If you want more of that, I've got good news. Games Workshop's Warhammer+ subscription includes a streaming service called Warhammer TV that's been trickling out animation since 2021, and there's now enough of it to easily justify subbing for a month to mainline the best of them.

Purist space marine action is sometimes dismissively called "bolter porn" by people who for some reason don't want to see boltguns in their negligee, but if large armored men fighting desperate last stands while the soundtrack swells is what you want then Angels of Death has it in spades. It's about a ship full of marines from the Blood Angels chapter who've been bundled across the galaxy by a warpstorm and stranded on a mysterious irradiated planet.

The Blood Angels' defining features are immaculate cheekbones, and their struggle to hold back a genetic flaw called the Black Rage. Angels of Death depicts the Black Rage with psychedelic style in its limited color palette of black, white, gray, and red, and these regular freakouts emphasize the larger-than-life quality of the Blood Angels—even their anger is bigger and more dramatic than that of mere mortals.

Angels of Death isn't all space marines being Greek gods with guns though, and some of the best scenes take place back on their ship, which the ruthless shipmistress has to hold together in their absence. There are plenty of those classic bridge crew scenes where people shout about bearing and shields while lurching from left to right with each impact, and the ordinary human support staff of the marines get to be equally steadfast and cool.

But if it's desperately ordinary characters struggling through a world of shit you really want, then Interrogator will be more your thing. It's likewise limited in its color palette, fittingly for a story where everything is about shades of gray, though the animation is 2D rather than 3D. The disheveled noir protagonist is an agent of the Inquisition trying to track down his old boss's killer with frequent pauses to demolish a frankly heroic quantity of drugs and alcohol. He's the galaxy's most deadbeat down-and-out detective and he lives on a planet that's 50% divebar backalley, 50% dirty rain.

Those are both fairly long series, which have been conveniently assembled into movie-length "final cut" versions as well. Warhammer TV also has one-off animations, of which the best is Iron Within. It's about Astra Militarum soldiers whose world is being overrun by dark eldar, and who are so cut off from the rest of the Imperium they regard space marines as legends who probably don't exist, and certainly aren't worth calling for help. Broken Lance, which is about the neo-feudal mech pilots of the Imperial knights, doesn't quite match Iron Within for ultra-grimness, though it is interesting to see the way the Imperium marries medieval worldviews with its highest-tech machinery.

More recently Warhammer TV's been doing three-part series like Pariah Nexus, in which a fanatical Sister of Battle and a marine from the Salamanders chapter are forced to work together on a world being overrun by the skellybot necrons. In a nice change the transhuman space marine is more compassionate than the baseline human he's paired with, and the story continues into the first episode of another three-parter called The Tithes. This one's an anthology though, with each episode about a different way the citizens of the Imperium are expected to pay for its protection, and how much more it ends up costing them.

There's no papering over the nastiness of the Imperium in The Tithes, with the second episode about a boatload of psykers being shipped off-world, many of whom will ultimately be used up like Duracells to keep the Emperor's power on, while the last one's about the lives of Imperial soldiers being less valuable than their ammunition. It's great, grim stuff.

The other three-parter is more skippable. The Exodite explores a three-way conflict including the t'au, who I've yet to see written as viewpoint characters in a way that didn't put me to sleep. With their mechs and vaguely Japanese culture they're easy to see as an attempt at appealing to anime kids that's been awkwardly glued onto the setting, not nearly goth enough to feel like they belong. The Exodite doesn't do enough to change that impression.

Hammer & Bolter is an anthology series that's been running since Warhammer TV began, and the quality's a real roll of the dice. The original run of episodes were one-and-done peeks at different corners of the Warhammer 40,00 universe, with the highlights being episodes about a tech-priest and her robot called Kill Protocol, Sisters of Battle in a typically desperate last stand called A Question of Faith, and Cadia Stands, another Astra Militarum story about how war is futile and also hell.

The main thing letting Hammer & Bolter's early episodes down was the animation quality, which was 2D and jerky, with battle scenes sometimes cheaping out into a pan across a still image like a Ken Burns documentary about the 41st millennium—though the most recent episode, Return to Cadia, switches to more impressive 3D animation.

Later episodes include a few that explore the fantasy Age of Sigmar setting, and are also skippable. The best of the bunch is Monsters, from the point of view of the Darkoath marauders. Warhammer fiction often presents stories from the point of view of its "villains", like all the stories about space marines (boom, got 'em), and Monsters does present the dark-god worshippers sympathetically enough. By the end you understand why they go around making blood oaths to beings who are definitely not daemons, no way, our gods are just different to your gods and certainly aren't Lords of Chaos wearing fake beards.

The one series totally dedicated to Age of Sigmar is Blacktalon, which explores what it's like for the amnesia immortals called Stormcast Eternals, summoned from beyond death to fight and die again and again like they're playing a roguelike. It's not impossible to make these shiny-armored mirror universe Chaos Warriors seem exciting, but Blacktalon doesn't manage it. It's another 2D animation that looks like it had a lower budget, with timing that's slightly off and makes characters look like they're reacting too slow in the action scenes, every hit so telegraphed it doesn't have a sense of impact—like the half-speed rehearsal of a fight scene rather than the actual thing.

It telegraphs its twists just as blatantly, making you wait entire episodes to reveal things you probably already figured out for yourself as its protagonist grapples with a case of The Flashbacks for six episodes.

Still, between Angels of Death, Interrogator, Iron Within, Pariah Nexus, The Tithes, and whichever Hammer & Bolter episodes look like your cup of tea, that's enough shows to binge over the course of a month-long subscription. Of course, that's not all Warhammer+ offers. There's also a vault with old rulebooks and magazines to read, a couple of apps for tabletop players, and shows on Warhammer TV that aren't animation. While the painting tutorials aren't for me—you tell me to make a 60/40 mix of two paints as step one of a complicated multi-stage process and I've already given up—there's a lot of other stuff I've ended up watching.

Like Scrap Demon, a competitive modeling show where players are challenged to make something out of a random assortment of plastic sprues. Though there's a time limit and a trophy it's not as off-puttingly competitive as most reality shows—everyone's happy to trade parts with each other, and it's got a gentle vibe. It's basically The Great British Ork-Off. I also watch some of the Battle Reports, which condense down a wargame playthrough and often have a fun theme—one recreates the ork fighter pilot comic Deff Skwadron, while another's a destruction derby.

Some of this stuff, like the painting tutorials, resembles the kind of thing you could get free on YouTube, but it's a relief to watch videos about games that aren't drawn out to please the algorithm, and which usually wrap in under one hour instead of being dragged out for two or three. There's a pleasant lack of the parasocial too. I've watched so many hours of Ify Nwadiwe playing Commander on YouTube I feel like I know him personally—which obviously isn't true, but you know the sensation I mean—while, despite them seeming nice, I don't know anything about the hosts of Warhammer TV's shows. They're just a collection of first names and regional accents. Nobody here is relying on me liking, subscribing, and visiting their Patreon to make rent, and that's a relief.

And so, while I happily recommend a hit-and-run sub to Warhammer+, I'm going to keep my own sub going. Though new animations are added slowly, other stuff pops up on a weekly basis, including interviews with Games Workshop's writers and designers, and a year-long subscription means I get an exclusive miniature for free. The biggest downside to Warhammer TV is that it's a worryingly good advertisement for all things Warhammer, and I don't need more reasons to spend money on little plastic dudes.

As proof, the new Fantastic Four movie trailer that came out this week shows everyone using their powers except Pedro Pascal's Reed Richards, because even a level-100 Zaddy can't make stretchy noodle arms look cool.

This is why I'm so excited for Season 2 of the live-action Twisted Metal series on Peacock—even though I didn't (and probably won't) watch the first season. Twisted Metal Season 2 is coming this summer, as announced by a new teaser you can see below, with Anthony Mackie as John Doe, Beatriz as Quiet, and hey, the first appearance Anthony Carrigan as Calypso. (You like him. He played NoHo Hank in Barry.)

Cars, guns, explosions, yeah yeah yeah, but there it is, at the very end, the tiniest glimpse of a driver I can't wait to full see realized in live action:

Yeah, that's Axel sticking his hand into a giant gear that starts turning. In the Twisted Metal games, Axel is a guy named Axel who drives a vehicle named Axel that is basically two giant wheels his outstretched arms are locked into. There's no cab in Axel's car, his body is just out there completely unprotected while he drives around between huge tires shooting rocket launchers that are mounted on his shoulders.

They're gonna put Axel on the screen. They're gonna put this gloriously dumb vehicle on the screen in live action:

You can also catch a couple frames of Axel standing next to Axel as it's parked in the background in this shot:

It's probably going to look really stupid, a guy driving around between two enormous tires, which is probably why they only teased Axel instead of showing Axel, but who knows? Maybe it'll look awesome. Or maybe it'll look so stupid it'll just be awesome. Either way, like Axel, I'm ready to roll.

There does not exist a suitable crime in California's penal code to hold Warner Bros accountable for what it's doing with the Minecraft movie, so let's just call it sightcrime. I'm sad that a videogame film that should be a slam dunk on the scale of Sonic or Mario is showing all the charm of a moldy potato. I'm depressed at the thought that somebody sat at a desk for hours rendering these foreskin monstrosities.

The pair of villagers appear three seconds into the latest Minecraft movie trailer, and that's as far as I've gotten through the 60-second spot that aired during the NBA All-Star game. That's not entirely true: I hovered over the timeline on YouTube far enough to see more of Jack Black squeezed into his Steve shirt and Jason Momoa in a bad wig. What a horrid reminder that the whole film interprets Minecraft's blocky, flat-texture world into hyperrealistic meat monsters (featuring actual humans on a green screen, for some reason). For the sake of comparison, here's what villagers usually look like in Minecraft:

As you can see, actual Minecraft villagers are ugly in an endearing, Squidward-esque "leave me alone, I'm farming" sorta way. They're curmudgeons who will begrudgingly trade 18 emeralds for a slice of watermelon, hoping you accept their awful deal. They would never ask for a hug, but wouldn't pull away from one immediately.

Anyways, maybe the kiddos will dig it. Did you know this thing's out on April 4? God help us all.

Benny Franks (as he was commonly called around the Continental Congress) wasn't wrong: The Mortal Kombat game series has been rebooted twice already, once in 2011 and then again in 2023, and the film series got its first reboot with 2021's Mortal Kombat.

Now we're poised for a movie reboot sequel, as Mortal Kombat 2 (technically the fourth live-action Mortal Kombat movie) is due out on October 24. We learned a few years ago that Karl Urban was cast as Johnny Cage, and today we got our first look at him on a movie poster posted by the official Mortal Kombat Movie account on Twitter:

It’s Johnny ******* Cage," the Mortal Kombat Movie account said, above the image of Karl ******* Urban looking cool as *****.

The fun thing is, this isn't a movie poster for Mortal Kombat 2, it's a movie poster for Uncaged Fury, a film from within the Mortal Kombat-iverse starring world-famous actor and martial artist Johnny Cage. "From the studio that brought you Rebel Without a Cage" the poster reads, a quite-belivable title. In the background there are several leaping motorcycles, explosions, and billowing smoke. It's not a bad poster at all.

As for the movie itself, we'll see how that is in October. The reboot was OK—Wes called it "a pretty good time" but thinks for its R-rating it "could have gone harder." Adding Karl Urban to the formula certainly improves its chances.

Now Cockle is back in the saddle, taking Geralt's voice out for a ride in Netflix's animated feature length film The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep which premiered today on the streaming platform. I got the chance to interview Cockle last week ahead of the premiere and asked him if he feels at all like a legend riding back into town—to which he modestly demurred—but hearing his voice in a new project, this time beside some of the other live action cast like Joey Batey (Jaskier) and Anya Chalotra (Yennefer) does feel that way to me.

"It's always lovely to step back into Geralt's shoes," Cockle says, referencing the various spinoffs (like Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales) and smaller projects he's done as Geralt since the launch of The Witcher 3's final expansion Blood and Wine in 2016.

"I describe it as—no pun intended—but it is like slipping into a warm bath," though I think there's a good chance he might have in fact premeditated and intended that pun, just saying.

"This was a really nice project to be a part of because it was a little bit different," Cockle said of returning to do an animated film.

"One of the challenges was that they wanted the anime Geralt to be more vocal, basically. So I had to take Geralt to some places vocally that I hadn't been asked to take him before. I remember at one point the vocal director saying 'can you just project that a little bit more?' and I said 'Geralt doesn't yell!'" Cockle said, laughing a little at his own lament. "I did my best Geralt yell and we'll let the audience decide."

"The voice is a muscle so like any athlete who trains, and trains their muscle to do certain things spectacularly—not that I'm saying I'm spectacular—the voice is like that—" here Cockle slips into seamless Geralt-level gravel "—so now Geralt really is just part of my voice and I just fall right into it. Sometimes while I'm washing the dishes." He proceeds to do an impression of Geralt saying "Oh man I think I need to bleach this cup."

"He's part of me now, he's part of my vocal range," Cockle says.

Funnily enough, Geralt's voice is a bit like an accent that Cockle just sort of drops into. The longer he talks about Geralt, the more he slides slowly into the register, deeper than his natural speaking voice, and eventually I'm nearly just interviewing Geralt of Rivia—a talkative and friendly Geralt of Rivia.

Sirens of the Deep premieres streaming on Netflix today as a 90 minute animated film, a spinoff adventure for Geralt and Jaskier based on one of Andrzej Sapkowski's short stories.

Sirens of the Deep opens with Geralt (Doug Cockle) and Jaskier (Joey Batey) rambling through side-story territory and strapped for cash, no thanks to Geralt's well-documented aversion to killing creatures that were actually just minding their own business. So they agree to each take on the next job offered to them, leading to a musical performance for Jaskier and another opportunity to ethically refrain from monster hunting for Geralt.

The kingdom of Bremervoord has a problem: the prince (human) is inconveniently enamored with a princess (mermaid) which is going to cause some dynastic planning problems if allowed to continue. Though the merpeople kingdom and Bremervoord have lived in a tense peace for years, it's all at risk as the human pearl-diving industry wanders further into mermaid territory and human ships keep being attacked while the merpeople claim not to be the perpetrators.

As any story of simmering tension between humans and a neighboring society of non-humans is wont to go, Geralt winds up at the center trying to prevent a war as both kingdoms find further reasons to distrust each other. He's helped along by Jaskier's childhood friend and fellow bard Essi Daven (Christina Wren) as they translate overtures of love between human and mermaid monarchs and attempt to keep their respective people from killing each other while determining who's stirring this pot behind the scenes.

In the context of Netflix's growing Witcher adaptation universe, it's a good choice of story to pull from the source material for a standalone adventure and the right amount of artistic license with that material. By the by, it is great to hear Doug Cockle, voice of Geralt in CD Projekt Red's games, pulled in for one of Netflix's adaptations.

The choice in story allows for some nice mermaid society character designs, all gaunt torsos full of gills with kelp-y flowing accents and finned ears that look great in animation but wouldn't have been attempted in a live-action version. It features plenty of colorful undersea society sequences, ship battles, and a whole lineup of massive ocean-dwelling monsters.

Meanwhile, refocusing the story from the original (more on that below) means that director Kang Hei Chul and Studio MIR get to lean into plenty of flashy fight scenes. There's all of Geralt's pirouetting and mid-air acrobatics with sword choreography that you're only going to get in animation plus a few indulgent first-person Geralt POV shots during the bigger fights. If you're going to animate Geralt, of course you should take the opportunity to make him a superhero doing gravity-defying stunts without messing up his Pantene perfect hair.

One blemish on the overall production is that the couple of brief musical number sections feel a bit flat thanks to some weird mixing choices that leave the vocals and accompaniment without much range in volume. I gather it's essentially illegal not to give Joey Batey a singing part after the viral Toss A Coin To Your Witcher moment from the live action show's first season, but Sirens of the Deep really didn't toss him much of anything to work with.

Sirens of the Deep also briefly pays lip service to Geralt and Yennefer's relationship, though the reimagining of the relationships between other characters makes Geralt's hangup over her feel like a vestigial limb in this otherwise standalone story. At that rate, we could have likely done without Geralt's very brief nightmares explaining his falling out with his sorceress lover who makes no actual appearance in the story and pretty easily accepted his side adventure dalliances with Essi—it's not like it's a first for him or for Yen.

Considering The Source

Like Andrzej Sapkowski's short story A Little Sacrifice, Sirens of the Deep is in some ways a riff on Hans Christian Andersen's story The Little Mermaid. Where Sapkowski's work is often a sort of smirk in the direction of fairytales, Netflix's adaptation folds those references in with a more hopeful tone.

In general I've found Netflix's adaptations to miss the mark on The Witcher's true wry sense of humor in favor of shoving Jaskier out as comic relief with an implied laugh track. In this case though, having just re-read A Little Sacrifice, Jaskier's got nearly as many ba dum tshh-level lines right there in the text.

Sirens of the Deep does plenty of reimagining and recasting of characters, though mainly for the sake of telling a more coherent overall story. Those who've read Sword of Destiny will notice that the adaptation features a star-crossed prince and princess rather than a foolish duke and prideful mermaid along with a whole merpeople kingdom side of the story that is only hinted at in A Little Sacrifice. It spins a side character into an embittered bastard son of the throne with his own motivations. It also imagines a backstory for Jaskier as a young boy from Bremervoord so that Essi can be of-age with him as a love interest for Geralt rather than another barely-18 girl for the witcher to tumble into bed with.

Those changes in Geralt's tryst with Essi may actually be the biggest, since the original story spends comparatively little time on monster hunting and way more on Geralt fumbling the bag with this young bard in ways that leave them both much unhappier than what Sirens of the Deep depicts. Ultimately, A Little Sacrifice is a tragedy with a sour ending in which Geralt witnesses one inequitable doomed love story and is the unwilling party to another. His emotional navel-gazing sets him up to recontextualize his relationship with Yennefer as the stories after it immediately return to the dedication they both have to Ciri and the destiny that binds the three of them.

Call me a non-believer, but a more literal interpretation of A Little Sacrifice just would not have been the stuff of a feature-length film worth calling up Studio MIR for. The version we get here is a complete thought in its own right, even if 'hero forcibly negotiates peace between adjacent societies' is one we can all pretty much recite beat-by-beat.

It's a story that's missable by design—Geralt and Jaskier going to a town we'll never see again to solve a conflict with no bearing on the war of the Northern Kingdoms with help from characters who will never return to the plot. But by the same token it's self-contained and satisfying as a story and a well-choreographed 2D animation for Geralt in all his glory.

Legendary Entertainment has co-produced movies like Batman Begins, Warcraft, and A Minecraft Movie, as well as TV shows like The Expanse and Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft. Mary Parent, chairman of worldwide production at Legendary, said, "We pride ourselves on being thoughtful stewards of singular, beloved IP, and no property better fits that description than Magic: The Gathering. Alongside the fantastic Hasbro team, we look forward to creating a multimedia universe that thrills longstanding fans and creates a broad wave of new ones."

Previously, Netflix announced an animated series based on Magic: The Gathering was in the works, and as of September last year it still is. Are the two connected, or will we have dueling Magic: The Gathering universes on our hands? I have no idea.

No release date was mentioned so this is another "long way off" kind of deal, and assuming it survives development hell, it'll be ages before we can go to a cinema and see, I dunno, Idris Elba as Teferi and Scarlet Johansson as Chandra and Chris Hemsworth as Ajani Goldmane with, inevitably, Jack Black as Fblthp.

Here we are almost 15 years later, learning today via The Wrap that the film (it's just called Just Cause again) is now on its ninth writer, Aaron Rabin, writer of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan series. A director has also been attached since last year: Ángel Manuel Soto, who has some experience blowing things up from 2023's Blue Beetle.

That's progress, and I'm glad to see that the project hasn't simply died to its long-term exposure to development hell. There's still one big question, though: who's gonna play Rico Rodriguez? In 2017 (when the film was only on its fifth or sixth writer), Jason Momoa was announced as Rico, but that deal apparently fell through at some point and no new actor has been tagged to lead the movie. Hopefully we won't have to wait another 15 years to find out.

My own personal hope is that if a movie is in the works, there might be a new Just Cause game on the horizon, too. I never found Avalanche's destruction sandbox series especially deep, but they sure were pretty and a great place to mindlessly blow stuff up for a few hours every now and then. The last game, Just Cause 4, was released back in 2018, if you can believe it. I'm more than ready to strap on a grappling hook and wingsuit and watch Rico trash another dictator's tropical island.

The workplace comedy about a dysfunctional game development studio doesn't waste any time referencing the biggest game industry trend of the past two years: mass layoffs. Bricklesbee, the studio's executive producer, addresses the challenges the fictional studio has faced since last season, like Covid. Specifically, the end of Covid, which brought the end of sky-high profits and thus mass layoffs.

While Season 4 doesn't focus heavily on the layoff situation (which continued this week, somewhat ironically, with Ubisoft, who produces Mythic Quest, shuttering another studio and laying off nearly 200 employees), the topic does pop up from time to time throughout the season.

"This is not 2020. The Covid bubble has burst," David says in another episode when asked to hire more staff members.

"Dude, the videogame industry made 56 billion dollars last year," says Rachel Meyee (played by Ashly Burch).

"Yeah, down from 60 billion. We're down four billion dollars. Do we know if another global pandemic is coming?" David says. "I mean, we hope. I mean, not for the death and all that stuff, that's terrible. But we made so much money."

During a Mythic Quest press junket conducted over Zoom, I spoke to several of the show's creators and writers: Rob Mc Elhenney, co-creator, executive producer, and actor who plays Mythic Quest's founder Ian Grimm (and co-creator of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia); Megan Ganz, co-creator, executive producer, and writer; and Ashly Burch, writer, co-producer, and actor. I asked them about the challenge of threading the needle when it comes to making jokes about such a serious topic.

"This is exactly the kind of thing we talk about on [It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia] every year," Rob McElheney said. "We've got 20 years of experience of always walking that line. Especially if you're making satire, it actually becomes a little bit easier, because you're recognizing that these are not real people that you're talking about. On Sunny, it's essentially a live action cartoon about sociopaths. But in Mythic Quest, it's real people in a real industry."

"We talked about a lot of different things that were going on in the industry this season," said Ashly Burch. "There's the [Season 4] episode about AI that isn't exactly related, but talks a lot about industry layoffs. It's kind of difficult, it's hard to make it funny."

"It's a hard thing for us to look at, especially because a lot of our central beloved characters are management, so they're part of the people that do the laying off, as opposed to a lot of the people that get laid off," said Megan Ganz.

"It was a little bit hard, but we try to find comedic slants on it," Ganz said. "Like, our [QA] testers are now two old white guys [played by Sunny alums Andrew Friedman and Michael Naughton] because we figured that was a funny way to comment on… The only types of jobs that they're going to be able to get now are these low level jobs," said Ganz. "But it is a difficult topic."

"It is something I think about a lot, especially with the amount of layoffs that happened last year and how many companies were affected," Burch said. "And if we get a Season 5, maybe we can find a funny angle into it. But it's just such a depressing thing that's happening in the industry."

"If you're making a comedy, as we all know, there is a big difference between making something the subject of a joke or the butt of a joke, and that is something we are always asking ourselves. Well, wait, what's the joke? Is the joke about the industry and the hypocrisy within the industry?" McElhenney said.

"Is it punching down? Or is it punching up? Those are always the questions that we're always asking ourselves, and we like to believe that we get it right 100% of the time, but we don't," he said. "We sometimes swing and miss, and sometimes we swing and the fist lands right back squarely on our nose. We do our best."

Like today, when a guy on Twitter asked the star of Marvel's Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Simu Liu, if a Sleeping Dogs movie is happening, and got an actual affirmative response.

As reported by Newsweek, it started when influencer rinothebouncer posted a clip of 2012 action game Sleeping Dogs, after which another Twitter user named Zengames44 expressed an interest in a videogame sequel, speculating that if a Sleeping Dogs movie were to get made, it would help raise interest in a new game.

Zengames44 then tagged Simu Liu, essentially asking him to make it happen. "Are you Wei [Shen]?"

"Working with the rights holders to bring Sleeping Dogs to the big screen!" Liu replied. Well, that was easy. Why don't we just directly ask movie stars everything? All credit to Zengames44 for just reaching out.

This is potentially good news for Sleeping Dogs fans—a movie adaptation has been in the works for a while, set to star Donnie Yen, but Yen revealed recently to Polygon that the film was officially a no-go. Hopefully, Liu will have more luck, and by the looks of things, it's been a dream of his for quite a while. In a reddit AMA in 2021, Liu was asked which game adaptation he'd most want to star in, and he said: "Sleeping Dogs was pretty lit."

When asked for comment, PC Gamer's Mollie Taylor said "Holy shit Sleeping Dogs movie???? That would be sick." (Please note the four question marks indicating Mollie's interest level.) PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens said "i would kill and die for Sleeping Dogs," adding, "every so often i awake in a cold sweat from black dreams about the cancelled Sleeping Dogs sequel set in the Pearl River Delta." So I think you can say PC Gamer is interested in both the movie and a videogame sequel.

In a followup message posted after his first one started to get attention, Liu confirmed he's not kidding around—and said he's got his eyes on a new Sleeping Dogs game, too.

In 2018, Syama Pedersen started uploading Astartes, a five-part Warhammer 40,000 fan film that was so good Games Workshop hired him to work on their own animations. Not only that, they made the Retributor chapter of space marines he'd invented part of the official canon. Since then Pedersen's name has shown up in places like the credits of the 40K episode of Amazon's Secret Level, but what we've really been waiting for is a sequel to Astartes.

And here it is. The trailer for Astartes 2 is 80 seconds of hardcore marine-on-alien action, and it rules. Like the original Astartes, it makes the marines seem weighty without looking awkward or cumbersome, agile enough to cross a barricade like a 1970s TV cop sliding across the hood of a car, or hurtle down a tunnel with a jetpack at full speed.

As explained in an accompanying Warhammer Community post, this teaser is a kind of prequel to introduce the five marines who'll be the protagonists of Astartes 2. We see each one's helmet up close interspersed with scenes of their chapters doing ultraviolence on aliens and heretics, and interestingly they're all members of secondary "successor" chapters rather than the popular ones. Where most official animations and videogames are about chapters like the Ultramarines and Blood Angels, here we see what I'm pretty sure are Retributors, Angels Vermillion, Sons of Medusa, Mortifactors, and Scythes of the Emperor (they're the ones with the amazing capes).

At the end, the final helmet belongs to a terminator marine and bears an Inquisition seal, suggesting that the five marines will have joined the Deathwatch, just like Titus at the start of Space Marine 2, and be working together to fight xenos. "Suffer not the alien to live," as the teaser's final quote has it, before a release date of "2026". We'll be waiting a while then, though there's other Warhammer shows to tide us over. I just watched the three episodes of The Tithes, an anthology about the price the Imperium asks of its citizens, and that's thoroughly decent too.

• Mikey from the Life cereal commercials died from eating Pop Rocks and Coke
• In the next Friday the 13th movie, Freddy Kruger from the Elm Street movies would fight Jason
• In the next Alien movie, the aliens would come to Earth

I had no reason to doubt any of these because they all came from the same source, a kid named Gavin, who I just assumed was plugged into the Hollywood grapevine of celebrity deaths and production deals despite being an 11-year-old boy living 2,500 miles from Los Angeles. And one of those rumors eventually came true: Freddy and Jason did fight each other in a movie in 2003.

Mikey, thankfully, didn't burst from eating candy and soda simultaneously, but Gavin's third rumor is finally sort of happening: the aliens from Alien are coming to Earth, only it's a TV series and not a movie.

The show is coming to FX and Hulu this summer and is called Alien: Earth, which feels like a working title they eventually just decided to stick with. The cast includes Sydney Chandler, Timothy Olyphant, Alex Lawther, Essie Davis, and Samuel Blenkin. Here's the teaser:

We don't really see a whole lot—it's a teaser, after all—and most of it is from the alien's perspective so we can't really tell what form the xenomorph is taking. But I'm getting a real flying insect vibe, as it flits and bangs around the narrow corridors of a spaceship like a wasp that's gotten trapped in your car. As it bonks against the window and the perspective switches to an exterior camera we get a few blurry frames of what could be a giant wasp-like body—multiple legs and translucent wings? Or am I just imagining things because a wasp stung me in the face a few months ago?

Weirdly, the show is somehow a prequel to the original Alien film from 1979, which means the xenomorphs got to Earth before Ellen Ripley's first encounter with the acid-blooded creatures in space, though maybe Alien: Earth will provide a reason as to why Ripley's ship The Nostromo was sent to investigate the mysterious signal on LV-426 in the first place. Or has that already been answered in one of the other seemingly unending Alien-related properties? I've fallen way behind on the lore. I never even finished playing Alien: Isolation.

At least we know how the xenomorphs got to Earth, which is by infecting and crashing a spaceship, which I think is how they always get everywhere. Gotta hand it to 'em: they stick with what works.

Page, you'll recall, starred in Beyond: Two Souls, a "psychological action thriller" about a girl whose powerful telepathic abilities lead her into a web of intrigue and conspiracies. It was well received when it launched for the PlayStation 3 in 2013, although not without criticism: Former PC Gamer wordsmith Andy Kelly said ahead of the game's years-later release on PC that "it feels like David Cage is trying to make ten completely different films at once, resulting in a confusing jumble of themes and tone."

"It doesn't know whether it's a supernatural thriller, a coming-of-age teen melodrama, or an action movie," Kelly wrote in 2019. "It leaps between time periods and genres so wildly, and for so little reason, that it's almost impossible to get invested in the story. And when Jodie visits a wise old Native American in the New Mexico desert, well… let's just say 'write what you know' is a piece of advice Cage should have taken to heart.

"There's a SWAT team too, of course, and a gratuitous shower scene."

That shower scene turned out to be an issue for reasons aside from its gratuitousness: Page's character appears nude in the scene, and while the character model isn't fully visible in the game, some enterprising jerk who presumably had a PS3 devkit used a "free camera" mode to create and upload images to the internet. Page didn't actually get naked for the game—the 3D model was made by an artist—but nonetheless reportedly explored legal action against Sony over the images after efforts to work things out with Quantic Dream didn't go anywhere. Sony eventually issued takedown notices to sites hosting the images, and the potential legal action does not appear to have been pursued further.

All water under the bridge now, apparently. "Filming the game was one of the most challenging and fulfilling acting experiences of my career," Page said. "The story's rich narrative and emotional depth offer us a fantastic foundation. We want to create a unique vision of the characters and their journeys that resonates with fans and newcomers."

What role Quantic Dream will play in the production of the Beyond: Two Souls show, if any, isn't clear, but studio founder David Cage said he's "absolutely thrilled to collaborate again with Elliot Page on this project."

"I was blown away by his acting performance in the game, and I couldn’t think of anyone else to tell this story with the same passion on another medium," Cage said. "Beyond: Two Souls is a very special game for millions of players around the world who were moved by the story of Jodie and Aiden, and their journey in life and beyond. I know that Elliot has all the talent and instinct to make it something really unique on TV."

There was a time when television or film adaptations of videogames were DOA by default, but things have changed in recent years as shows like The Witcher, The Last of Us, Fallout, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, and Arcane have launched to critical acclaim and commercial success. There are still plenty of stinkers out there like Borderlands (well, maybe not quite like Borderlands, because hoo boy) but the point is that it's no longer safe to dismiss these things out of hand. Beyond: Two Souls earned praise for its story and acting, and it's not unreasonable to expect that will carry over to a TV show, which unlike the game will turn entirely on its story and acting.

There's currently no indication as to when Beyond: Two Souls will turn up on your TV: The Deadline report says the series is now in "early development."

Also like a zombie, it's pretty stinky and usually rotten. The seven live-action Resident Evil films have been a string of critical flops, with none of them scoring above 38% on Rotten Tomatoes. And even if you discount snooty critics, fan scores never get above 67% for any of the six original Mila Jovovich films, either. The 2021 movie reboot was also pretty heavily panned, the television show on Netflix didn't make anyone happy, and I don't even know what's going on in this gunfight from one of the CG movies

So, why take yet another stab at a Resident Evil movie adaptation? Well: money. As bad as they are, the Resident Evil movies have collectively earned over a billion dollars at the box office. And, according to The Hollywood Reporter, Zach Cregger will write and direct the new Resident Evil reboot, which got the attention of several studios.

Cregger made a name for himself as a horror director after 2022's Barbarian, which was legit good. The Hollywood Reporter also says that Cregger's next horror film, Weapons, is testing well (though it's not set to be released until 2026), which has led to a bidding war over Cregger's Resident Evil reboot, with Netflix, Warner Bros, and other studios all trying to acquire it.

As for the reboot itself, it's reported to be "a revamp that will take the title to its horror roots and be more faithful to the initial games," though I feel like that's what they said about the last reboot, too? I've asked Netflix for comment and will update this story if I hear back.

The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep is a new animated project from Netflix that'll explore one of Andrzej Sapkowski's short stories, A Little Sacrifice. In an interview with SFX magazine (via GamesRadar), writer Mike Ostrowski discussed what fans can expect from this movie including a neat little easter egg.

Sirens of the Deep is set in the middle of episodes five and six from Season 1 and will follow Geralt and Dandelion in the port town of Bremervoord, making peace between land dwellers and merfolk. Episode five is when Geralt meets Yennefer for the first time in the mayor of Rinde's house, which is the start of the long and slightly rocky relationship.

"Geralt cannot let Yennefer go, even though he's trying his best," Ostrowski says. "She haunts him. Even if he wanted to be rid of her, he can't." We get a short glimpse of Yennefer in the official trailer for Sirens of the Deep, but even if she doesn't make a massive appearance, that doesn't mean her presence isn't felt.

Co-writer Rae Benjamin explains how they were able to include a "fun little scene," which was actually cut from the main series. Unfortunately, we don't get anything concrete as to what this may entail, but Benjamin does hint at it being more Geralt and Yennefer content.

But Yennefer isn't the only love interest that Geralt has during Sirens of the Deep. Essi, a talented bard like Dandelion, meets Geralt while he is in Bremervoord, which is the start of another complicated albeit short relationship after Geralt kisses her at a banquet. Essi goes on to play an important part in uncovering the truth about some odd deaths of local pearl divers and the discovery of a mysterious race of merfolk alongside Geralt and Dandelion.

Unfortunately, after everything is said and done at Bremervoord, Essi and Geralt's relationship doesn't have a happy ending. But you'll be able to see how everything plays out for yourself when Sirens of the Deep releases on February 11 on Netflix.

But after seeing nine of the ten episodes of Mythic Quest Season 4 (the finale was cruelly withheld) I'm happy to report that despite the long delay, the show hasn't missed a step. Mythic Quest Season 4, which begins January 29 on Apple TV+, proves it's still a nimble comedy with a lot of heart, packed with enough gaming references to make nerds smile but not so many that it becomes impenetrable to non-gamers.

So, two years later… where are we? Ian Grimm (McElhenney), creative director of fictional MMO Raven's Banquet, is still a pretentious, self-absorbed twit, though he's at least trying to respect the boundaries of his creative partner, Poppy (Charlotte Nicdao)—and you know this because Ian is constantly pointing out how he's respecting Poppy's boundaries. The creative duo quickly runs into issues as Poppy gets a boyfriend for the first time, meaning she's less willing to spend 100% of her time at work.

Ian struggles with Poppy's new relationship not just out of jealousy and insecurity—though there's plenty of that, too—but because he genuinely cares about her and feels like she may be slipping away. And the tighter he clings to the most important relationship in his life, the further away Poppy wants to flee. It's a thread that runs through the season, and not just among the show's two main characters but nearly everyone else: how do you maintain a work-life balance when work is your life and you consider the people you work with your real family?

While Poppy and Ian struggle with the lines drawn between their personal and professional relationships, they're also trying to put a new expansion for Raven's Banquet together, though the studio, led by David Brittlesbee (David Hornsby), is more interested in milking money from smash-hit Playpen, a Roblox-like kiddie game which thrives on and profits from user-generated content. Meanwhile, David struggles to maintain control over Cozy Galaxy, another popular game that's the brainchild of former game tester Dana (Imani Hakim) who has aligned with conniving finance wizard Brad (Danny Pudi) to get the big payday she feels she's earned.

As we got a hint of in the trailer, Season 4 has fun with a few real-life trends from the gaming industry, even the darker ones. There are several references to the massive layoffs the industry has suffered over the past couple years, mostly from David, who laments the good old days of the "Covid bubble" when the game industry made $60 billion a year instead of a paltry $54 billion. ("Do we know if another global pandemic is coming?" he asks. "I mean, we hope. I mean, not for the death and all that stuff, that's terrible. But we made so much money.")

AI has invaded the gaming space (and everything else) in the past few years, which becomes central to the plot of one episode in which it's put to use first as a moderation tool for Mythic Quest's kiddie game, and then as avatars for Ian and Poppy—which allows them to quickly learn just how insufferable they both really are to work with. As it did with NFTs and Nazis in previous seasons, Mythic Quest Season 4 does a good job of approaching these types of topics with a light touch and a few scathing jokes without getting swamped in just how horrifying and destructive they really are to the gaming industry and community.

At the same time, I'm a little disappointed the fictional MMO itself is barely featured in the show this season. We see a couple of testers playing it, and Poppy and Ian collaborate on the expansion but few details are ever shown. I know that videogames in TV shows never look quite right or feel anything close to accurate, but I would have appreciated at least some effort put into depicting this MMO on-screen, as the show did in earlier seasons. Without a laser-focus on the fictional games, Mythic Quest starts to feel like a more general workplace comedy: a good one, but one that could be taking place in just about any field.

But that's ultimately OK because it's well-written and performed—by which I mean that even when you can clearly see a joke coming it doesn't mean it won't still make you laugh. The creators have also balanced both ends of the sincerity spectrum: the times where it appears to be getting serious but then rug-pulls you with a quick joke, and the times where it genuinely tries to tug at your heartstrings. It can get away with both moves because beneath the biting humor, the semi-slapstick confrontations, and the sudden bursts of profanity, Mythic Quest is really quite sweet, but smart enough not to play the sweetness card too often or for too long.

Like I said, I haven't seen the finale yet, but unless it seriously biffs it, Mythic Quest Season 4 is the most I've enjoyed the show since its first season back in 2020: breezy, funny, and with just the right amount of heart. You can't quite binge it, though: the first two episodes arrive on Apple TV+ on January 29, and after they arrive weekly on Wednesdays.

That's as per a trailer posted to developer Arcsystemworks' (Arcsys) channel yesterday, one that's looking like it'll be just as stylish as the game it's built on.

As per the video's description, Dual Rulers kicks off during the wedding of Ky Kiske to Dizzy, a half-Gear (a kind of magic, living weapon) who is the daughter of Justice. Everyone's a little nervous because, well, Justice sort of tried to wipe out humanity after she was created by That Man. No, really, that's his name. I've barely scraped the surface of Guilty Gear lore and it's all equally irreverent, which makes it perfect anime fodder.

In fact, Arcsys kinda knew that—which is why it had a stab at making a pseudo-anime for the game's Story Mode. Only, time and budget constraints being what they were (alongside the game's development during the Covid-19 pandemic) it's a little… inconsistent. It's charmingly ambitious, though, even if it feels like you're watching an in-engine storyboard at times.

Which is why this series, built in partnership with Sanzigen Studios, feels like a 'this is how we would've done it'—Arcsys isn't working with an Arcane-sized budget or anything, but the show is already looking super snazzy, with some flashes of exciting fight choreography that'll do its roster of ridiculously-armed superhumans justice.

I'm mostly just hyped to see some of its cast do their thing. As an Elphelt player I'm a touch biased, but seeing my girl strike a pose made me happy. Bridget fans'll also be eating good, as she's yo-yo'd her way into the narrative. The actual protagonist, however, appears to be Sin Kiske, who is Ky and Dizzy's son and is also, uh, three years old. He just looks like that. Gears age quickly. It's a whole thing.

You'll be able to watch Guilty Gear Strive: Dual Rulers on Crunchyroll in April, with a specific date yet to be confirmed. And if it gets delayed, we can just pin the blame on the beasts, anyway.

Now, we already knew we were getting a fourth movie. The post-credits scene for Sonic the Hedgehog 3 introduced Amy Rose to the cinematic universe for the first time as well as an appearance from Metal Sonic, plus the pre-production was announced just before the threequel's theatrical release. We didn't know exactly when we'd be getting that fourth movie, though (fourquel? Quadquel?) Until now, that is.

As reported by GamesIndustry.biz, Paramount Pictures has slapped a March 19, 2027 release date on Sonic the Hedgehog 4. Yeah, that's two years away, which seems like an age, but I'm honestly pretty dang impressed by the pace in which the studio is churning these movies out. Let's not forget the first one only came out back in February 2020, and then there was all the, y'know, pandemic stuff to deal with before the second movie hit cinemas in April 2022.

A two-year cycle on what have been, so far, three very solid films is no mean feat. I do have to wonder if we'll be seeing a full cast return for the next entry, though. Jim Carrey is ace as Robotnik, but I wouldn't blame him for hanging up his goggles and bald cap after three goes at the role (and an extra character to play in the most recent movie).

I hope he does though, and I doubly hope Paramount can continue its streak of a genuinely good, entertaining piece of Sonic media. And hey, I may be getting ahead of myself, but if there's going to be a Sonic the Hedgehog 5, may I present Rogue the Bat as the next character? My girl needs her screentime.

But also in the mix with a chance to take home the "$4.97 gold spray-painted" statuette is 2024 videogame adaptation Borderlands, which has earned six Razzie nominations—and that includes some special attention for its chatty little robot Claptrap.

Borderlands was a bomb in every sense of the word, getting destroyed by critics and fans alike, and barely recouping enough at the box office to cover its marketing costs, let alone the $115 million reported budget.

Racking up six Razzie nominations feels like salt in the wound, but these Hollywood stars are supposed to have thick skins, right?

Borderlands' Razzie nominations are for the following:

1. Worst Picture
2. Worst Director (Eli Roth)
3. Worst Actress (Cate Blanchett)
4. Worst Supporting Actor (Kevin Hart)
5. Worst Supporting Actor (Jack Black)

But that's not the end of derision for Jack Black's performance as Claptrap. The 6th Razzie nomination for Borderlands appears in a special category called "Screen Combo," which apparently includes scenes featuring "Any Two Obnoxious Characters (But Especially Jack Black)."

That seems like a pretty heavily stacked deck, and it means he's nominated for two separate acting Razzies for the same character in the same movie. I haven't seen Borderlands myself, but I found Claptrap pretty grating in the games, so I support these nominations in spirit.

It gets worse: Black is also nominated for Worst Actor for his role in Dear Santa, so he's actually got three acting Razzie noms across just two movies. Harsh.

But there's plenty of hate to spread around. Jerry Seinfeld also received a Worst Acting nom for Unfrosted, Jon Voight was nominated for Worst Supporting Actor in all four movies he somehow made in 2024, and Kraven the Hunter got a sprinkling of abuse for Worst Screenplay and Worst "Prequel, Remake, Rip-Off, or Sequel," though I'm not sure it actually qualifies for any of those things. You can read the rest of the Razzie nominations on the official site.

Poncle also said there are more Vampire Survivors tie-ins on the way this year, the result of teaming up with other developers (like 2024's Balatro collaboration for Friends of Jimbo).

And, in addition to the Vampire Survivors animated series we first heard about a couple of years ago, there's apparently also a live-action Vampire Survivors film in the works. Don't burst out of your house and dash to the theater, though: the project could be a long way off for a few different reasons.

"As mentioned last year, rather than jumping the gun and make stuff for the sake of making it, we have preferred to wait to find partners that felt right, especially because to make anything that isn't a videogame out of VS requires good ideas, creativity, and that quirky knowledge of the game, that is a very difficult triplet to get 100% right," Poncle said.

The other issue is one I wish more makers of videogame adaptations would be aware of before rushing a movie to the big screen with dollar signs in their eyes. "Please remember the game has no plot," Poncle says, adding: "(it doesn't? 👀)." That makes it tricky to envision what a filmed version of the game would even be. The studio says it is also "respecting all the strikes and taking our time to get things right."

Patches, updates, DLC, videogame tie-ins, a live-action film and an animated series isn't even the full list of what Poncle is working on. "This year we should also be able to reveal a few other 'cross-media' things we've been working on. I'm just going to leave this sentence here," the developer said cryptically.

Well, what else could there be to make? A card game? A tabletop RPG? A Vampire Survivors theme park filled with real vampires? We'll find out later this year. There's lots more info in Poncle's post on Steam, and below you can watch the 2024 Vampire Survivors wrap-up video.

On the other hand, shot entirely inside GTA Online, Grand Theft Hamlet is a refreshing and nuanced exploration of telling old stories in new and unlikely ways.

As a long-serving (and long-suffering) GTA roleplay enthusiast, the project—led by Sam Crane, Mark Oosterveen and Pinny Grylls—also provides a hilarious, candid glimpse behind the velvet rope at the hardships of staging, well, anything in the throes of a virtual warzone. The public lobbies in GTA 5's online offshoot are brimming with trigger-happy griefers who can make the short 60-second stroll around the perimeter of Legion Square without having your guts painted on the sidewalk impossible. Auditioning, rehearsing and acting out a 400-year-old play in a decade-old open world should be out of the question.

Granted the limitations of GTA Online's sandbox often twist the classic beyond recognition—Shakespeare's most ubiquitous soliloquy plays out against the faint whir of police sirens and rifle blasts somewhere off in the distance, for example, while a nightclub-promoting blimp inadvertently crashes from the sky at one point prompting a forced intermission—but it all just works every step of the way.

From a personal standpoint, I've lost count of the hours poured into each batshit roleplay scenario I've conjured over the last several years, therefore I simply cannot fathom the amount of time, effort and failure that must have gone into a project so ambitious in scale as this one. And that's before editing the "making of"-style documentary that's since featured at the London Film Festival among other prestigious events around the globe.

That alone is well worth celebrating.

The Comedy of Errors

There is, of course, a tragic irony about the fact Grand Theft Hamlet was first conceived during the harshest restrictions of early-2021 COVID-19 lockdowns. Isolated and out-of-work, London-based actors Crane and Oosterveen used GTA Online's dysfunctional playground more as a distraction from the uncertainty of the world in that moment, than the hotbed for creative endeavour it'd become.

Fast forward several months with Grylls enlisted as co-director, and the likes of Bernardo, Marcellus, Claudius and the play's titular Prince of Denmark himself were portrayed by typically outlandish in-game avatars sporting fishnet stockings, bright crimson underwear, Lincoln-esque tophats, and a full-body lime green alien suit with protruding ass plates that appeared to wiggle ever-so-slightly with every movement.

In the same way Baz Luhrmann steered Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet off the beaten track with his mid-90s crime drama adaptation, Grand Theft Hamlet skirts between the sublime and the ridiculous with great effect, while iconic lines are hamstrung by lag or the grainy audio quality levied by headset microphones, lending the whole thing a Monty Python-like charm.

Beyond its technical marvel and scope to snapshot a moment in time, then, Grand Theft Hamlet's greatest achievement is perhaps its ability to reach an audience that otherwise wouldn't hear this story. Hamlet is a bonafide classic in literary terms, but if you're less into works inspired by Greek tragedy and Elizabethan drama and more into blowing shit up while tearing down a make-believe highway in a stolen car, do you really care?

As a Glasgow teenager at high school in the early 2000s, I remember being forced to read Twelfth Night and wondering the whole time why "this boring old English bastard" had anything to do with modern learning. As an adult, my opinions of Shakespeare have matured, but if someone had rendered Viola and Sebastian in San Andreas or Vice City between 2002 and 2004, I'd have been all over it.

Which could well be the case in the here and now with Grand Theft Hamlet. Performance culture has long existed in GTA Online, not least through its once thriving stunt scene, its machinima community, and, indeed, its roleplay servers, but whenever something cracks the mainstream—when in-game documentaries are being treated with the same reverence as anything on streaming services or the latest hard-news expose of the day—then it's worth paying attention.

After every episode of HBO's The Last of Us aired in 2023, I received a text message from my mother gushing about how sophisticated its narrative and characters were, and how while she's "not normally into zombie stories," this one was so well told. Anyone familiar with the PlayStation game, of course, had experienced the same tale up to 10 years earlier. My mother is never going to play The Last of Us, but she still managed to enjoy Ellie and Joel's post-apocalyptic exploits by different means—and that's exactly how I see Grand Theft Hamlet.

It's also a two-way street: people into GTA might discover something they otherwise wouldn't have, while the Shakespeare-loving bardolators among us, again, are shown the boundless possibilities of videogames with the right creative minds in front of their screens.

And so through all of this, when Grand Theft Hamlet asks: to be or not to be? To be honest, it's not even a question.

Grand Theft Hamlet releases in US theaters today. For more info, here's the official website.

That flimsy premise somehow sprawled into dozens of games, some of them among the best ever made. Turns out you can't get much cooler than a guy with a whip, if you draw him right.

Season 2 of Castlevania: Nocturne, the centuries-later continuation of Netflix's original Castlevania series, features the best drawings of a guy with a whip yet made by human hands. Granted, the team at Powerhouse Animation are pretty much just competing against themselves at this point—the fluid, snaking whip cracks that impressed in the first couple seasons of Castlevania now look pedestrian next to the superhuman stuff Richter Belmont pulls off in the second half of this season. His whip is so alive, so frequently charged up with a crackling coating of electricity or shards of magical ice as it dismembers a vampire that it almost feels like he's cheating.

How'd this guy so thoroughly out-whip and out-cool his great-great-great-etc.-grandfather Trevor Belmont from the original series? Generational wealth, man. Nothing beats it.

The first season of Nocturne was a reset, proving that the series could continue on by adapting a new game with new characters, and without original writer Warren Ellis, who was accused of sexual misconduct by more than 60 women in 2020. It features a wickedly good villain and turns Castlevania: Rondo of Blood's generic damsel Annette into an Afro-Caribbean slave turned revolutionary with earthbending witchcraft powers drawn from her ancestors, perhaps the best argument for ignoring the source material ever made. It ambitiously grounds the vampire action in the real French Revolution of the late 1700s and earnestly tries to connect the immortal lives of vampires to the political turmoil that feels so urgent—so new—to the young humans fighting demons and the aristocracy all at once.

On ideas and ambition it's the best the series has ever been, but Nocturne Season 2 wastes too much time flitting back and forth between its characters for the first four episodes without meaningfully pushing their stories forward. It's a strange cadence, with short conversations often retreading the same emotional beats. I found myself sorely missing the longer, more overtly philosophical speeches and exchanges in the original show.

Those slow, thoughtful/dark/funny/weird scenes came to define Netflix's Castlevania just as much as its action. It was the odd balance of the two, so unexpected in an adaptation of a series where you smash in secret walls to find roasted turkeys and snag hearts hidden in candelabras, that made the show a rare treasure.

Nocturne just doesn't quite have the same flair for words or pacing, first dragging its heels and then rushing to its conclusion. There was room for more quality time between Richter and Annette and the world-weary Alucard, who pulls off one action move ripped straight from Symphony of the Night that had me howling. There could've been time for some more indulgent speeches with sharper plotting across the eight episodes to make better use of the supporting cast, which is even more varied and interesting than the original show's.

Those missteps hold Nocturne back from greatness, but my god, what a spectacle it is when Powerhouse Animation goes all-out; the time, skill, and budget poured into this season's fights tower above everything they've done before.

I'll be rewatching clips of these fights for years to come. Trying to describe them would be pointless. Just be prepared to finish the series and immediately yearn for the Castlevania game that makes you feel even 1% as badass as Richter at peak performance. Only Konami could squander advertising this good and not have a single new Castlevania game to show for the eight years this show's been running. Ah, well; Vampire Survivors or Dead Cells it is, then.

Nocturne teases a mystery that could unravel into a third season, but it also culminates in such a relentlessly escalating battle that there's a sense of Powerhouse leaving it all on the field here. What's left, really? Bringing back Dracula just to kill him again? Maybe this is where it should end. But as long as there's still a whip, I'll be there for the next one.

That ambitious plan was shared on the Helldivers 2 Discord by Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani. "We're all hoping for as many A-list actors as possible," Jorjani wrote in response to a user who expressed hope that Chris Pratt—he who seems to star in everything—won't be in the film. "As long as they all get killed violently immediately."

Signing up a bunch of big names just to kill them off as graphically as possible is perhaps not the most realistic plan ever, but it's not without precedent. My mind immediately flashes back to the 1996 action flick Executive Decision, starring Kurt Russell and Steven Seagal, in which Seagal gets unceremoniously snuffed in the first act. (Seeing that in the theater at a time before the internet spoiled everything was a real kick, let me tell you.)

It'd be a lot of fun to watch known names show up in the Helldivers 2 movie, do their thing for a few minutes, and then get whacked in some awful way—I'd absolutely love to see Michael Ironside brought in to reprise his "Rico, you know what to do!" scene from Starship Troopers. But Arrowhead may not have much of a say in the matter. Arrowhead chief creative officer Johan Pilestedt said on X that while the studio will be involved in the film, it's not clear to what extent just yet.

"The long answer is that we'll see," Pilestedt wrote. "We are not Hollywood people, and we don't know what it takes to make a movie. And therefore we don't, and shouldn't, have final say."

A-listers or not, the biggest challenge facing the Helldivers 2 movie out of the gate will be differentiating itself from Starship Troopers, the 1997 Paul Verhoeven film based on Robert Heinlein's 1959 sci-fi novel of the same time, which tells a very similar (but slightly less on-the-nose and funny) tale of a fascist Earth engaged in endless war against alien bugs. Comparisons are inevitable, and while Starship Troopers did not go over especially well at launch—the satirical aspect was easier to miss in those more innocent days—it's subsequently enjoyed something of a renaissance, as critics and audiences have come to recognize it as the subversive anti-fascist film it was meant to be. As PC Gamer's Shaun Prescott wrote, it'll be very interesting to see if the Helldivers 2 film "can manage to be more than a retread."

Netflix's next animated venture into the world of The Witcher has just got a new debut trailer, and this time, Geralt is all grown up and back to his normal witcher antics of fighting monsters and trying to talk sense into bloodthirsty and fearful humans.

The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep is based on the short story A Little Sacrifice by The Witcher author Andrzej Sapkowski. It sees Geralt and Dandelion travel to the port town of Bremervoord after a local prince, Agloval, hires them to help woo a mermaid, Sh'eenaz. Needless to say, the story goes awry once both lovers realise neither of them wants to give up their current comfy lifestyle to go live with the other, and a war almost breaks out between the two kingdoms.

We've already seen a couple of teaser trailers for Sirens of the Deep. But these have only confirmed what story it would follow, as well as the fact that Doug Cockle, the original voice of Geralt from The Witcher games, and not Henry Cavill, will be voicing Geralt in this upcoming film. But now, thanks to the release of the official debut trailer, we get to see even more about what this adventure will entail.

The best part of the trailer is all the new shots of the merfolk and the monsters that live under the water. There's giant four-legged fish, a whole battalion of armed warriors, and even a Kraken that makes a small guest appearance towards the end. The fights look as epic as always, and it'll be fun to see how Geralt manages to take on a bunch of mermaids and sea creatures while treading water out at sea.

But Sirens of the Deep isn't just about action and bloody monster fights, it also sees Geralt find another potential love interest: Essi, who we get to see more of in this new trailer. After venturing to Bremervoord to avoid running into Yennefer and all the complications that would bring, Geralt meets Essi while trying to hunt down the merfolk responsible for attacking some pearl divers. While she instantly falls for him, Geralt finds it harder to reciprocate her feelings. It's a bit of a messy will-they-won't-they, and while the outcome isn't very surprising, it's still a moving story and one that is really meaningful to Geralt's progression with Yennefer.

I'm quietly excited for Sirens of the Deep, especially after Nightmare of the Wolf. This animated Witcher film is still one of my favourites on Netflix and one that I even go back to every now and then just so I can witness all the magnificent sword fights, beautiful chaos magic, and young Vesemir. If the fights in Sirens of the Deep come anywhere close to being as good as the ones in Nightmare of the Wolf, I'll be very happy.

I genuinely can't wait for the second season of HBO's The Last of Us show. I'm not all that jazzed to watch it myself, but I really wanna see how folks who haven't played The Last of Us Part 2 react to its bigger moments. HBO put out a trailer this week (watch above) that suggests season two isn't shying away from the darkest and possibly most controversial moments in the game.

I hope it'll be less controversial to suggest that folks wait to watch HBO's version and instead play The Last of Us Part 2 first. It's really good, and it's also coming to PC around the same time that the show comes back in April.

This is mostly based on my experience with season one, which started really strong and had that neat Bill episode that expanded on a character we never got to know in the 2013 game. But I wasn't as happy with HBO's tireless sprint through the story, its surprising lack of action (the brutality of which was core to videogame Joel's development as a murderous anti-hero), and Pedro Pascal's resting sad face. Season one was a worthy interpretation of the game, but HBO's Joel and Ellie had drifted far away from their originals by the finale.

Which is why I'm confident you'll get something different (and maybe better) out of playing The Last of Us Part 2 before watching the broad strokes version of its story unfold over ten episodes. There's also the fact that Naughty Dog's sequel is a pretty excellent stealth-action game, constantly challenging you to overcome uneven odds through avoidance, anticipation, and resource management.

I'm planning a replay of Part 2 before giving the show another shot, and my mind is open to the ways HBO could improve on it, too. I'll be interested to see if the show has anything more poignant to say about the good ol' "cycle of violence" than the relatively weak sauce Neil Druckmann put on the page.

CNN says the Palisades Fire has now grown to more than 17,000 acres, "with zero containment," while the Eaton Fire has surpassed 10,000 acres. At least five people have been killed, and nearly 2,000 homes, businesses, and other structures have been destroyed. Other, significantly smaller but still largely uncontained fires are also burning, and roughly 130,000 people are under evacuation orders or warnings.

Some game studios in the area have closed their offices and told employees to stay home in order to facilitate evacuation and help keep streets clear for emergency vehicles. "Employee safety and well-being is our top priority," an Activision spokesperson told PC Gamer on Wednesday morning. "We're actively monitoring the situation as it is quickly evolving. We've been in contact with the employees closest to the impacted areas to confirm their safety and provide resources."

Variety, which cited numerous other shows that have paused production because of the fires including Hacks, NCIS, Grey's Anatomy, Jimmy Kimmel Live, and Abbott Elementary, said filming on Fallout was tentatively set to resume on Friday. Given the ongoing state of the fires, however, that seems unlikely. A separate Yahoo report says Fallout filming is now planned to resume on February 10, although that's dependent on the weather and state of the fires.

A map of the fires and evacuation orders can be found on the Cal Fire website and Watch Duty.

Mythic Quest, the sitcom about a game studio developing an MMO, is poised to begin its 4th season, which will start airing on Apple TV+ on January 29. You can check out the new trailer above—and don't forget, true to videogame form, the show has its own expansion aptly called Side Quest coming in March.

While it's a pretty breezy comedy, Mythic Quest has taken aim at the trends and tribulations of real game development in past seasons (like NFTs and Nazis), and it looks like Season 4 is gonna be no different: based on the trailer, the season's arc riffs on Roblox in particular.

"Playpen users are making sex games," says David Brittlesbee, beleaguered executive producer of the fictional MMO Raven's Banquet and Playpen, an Animal Crossing-style game the studio also publishes. On the screen behind him, we can see cartoonish avatars engaging in, well, cartoonish sex acts. "We can't have kids see these!"

"David, kids make these," says Rachel, Raven's Banquet's head of monetization (Ashly Burch). A moment later in the trailer, David (David Hornsby) is served with a summons and we see the two of them appearing in front of Congress where they're questioned about profiting off children. I don't imagine the hearing is going to go all that well.

Roblox using kids to make free content isn't the only mirror Mythic Quest is holding up to the industry this season, as we also see an AI-powered avatar of the MMOs creative director Ian Grimm (Rob McElhenney) that seems just as difficult to deal with as Grimm himself. Season 4 also looks to crank up the friction between Grimm and former game tester but now rising star in the cozy game space Dana Bryant (Imani Hakim).

I am admittedly a couple seasons behind in my viewing of Mythic Quest—I tuned out somewhere in Season 2. But it's nice to see the gang back after all this time: Season 3 aired way, way back in 2022.

The world of The Witcher has been expanding a lot in the past few years between multiple live action and animated Netflix productions, comic adaptations by Dark Horse, more Witcher games in the works from CD Projekt Red, and even a new addition to the list of Witcher books by original author Andrzej Sapkowski (though so far only in Polish).

It'll be a while before the new game's out, though, so let's look ahead at what's most imminent: season 4 of Netflix's The Witcher show. Here's what we know so far about who's been cast, the trailers, possible premiere window, and the plot for season 4.

Is there a release date for The Witcher season 4?

The premiere date for The Witcher season 4 isn't known yet, but it seems likely that it will arrive sometime in 2025. What appears to be a commemorative post from Freya Allan, Ciri's actress, suggests that the season probably finished filming around October 2024 which tracks with the announcement that filming began in spring 2024.

Season 3 of the show wrapped filming near the end of 2022 and then premiered in summer 2023, meaning that a season 4 premiere in 2025 feels pretty likely if it follows a similar timeline. We also know that the final season 5 was shot back-to-back with season 4, according to Netflix, so the wait between the two final seasons will likely be shorter than the two year wait between other seasons.

The Witcher season 4 trailers

The first trailer for The Witcher season 4 is an extremely short teaser that just gives us a look at new lead Liam Hemsworth as Geralt of Rivia. Hemsworth doesn't even get to speak in that teaser, so it's really hard to tell how he's going to play the role, but he sure is wearing a white wig.

Who's been cast in The Witcher season 4?

Season 4 of The Witcher will feature a lot of returning cast including the main trio of Geralt, Yennefer, and Ciri with bard tagalong Jaskier. The cast of sorcerers, sorceresses, and other political elements will also largely be returning. Of course we've long known that Geralt has been recast with Liam Hemsworth. It turns out that Geralt's mentor Vesemir was also recast, though to whom we don't know yet.

• Liam Hemsworth - Geralt
• Anya Chalotra - Yennefer
• Freya Allan - Ciri
• Joey Batey - Jaskier
• Graham McTavish - Dijkstra
• Cassie Clare - Philippa Eilhart
• Mahesh Jadu - Vilgefortz
• Christelle Elwin - Mistle
• Meng’er Zhang - Milva
• Eamon Farren - Cahir
• Anna Shaffer - Triss
• Bart Edwards - Emperor Emhyr

As for new characters, the show will be adding in members of upcoming story arcs for both Ciri and Geralt. Here's the new cast with confirmed roles so far:

• Laurence Fishburne - Regis
• Sharlto Copley - Leo Bonhart
• James Purefoy - Stefan Skellen
• Danny Woodburn - Zoltan Chivay

What will the plot of season 4 be?

According to Netflix, the fourth and fifth seasons of the show will cover the three remaining Witcher books: Baptism of Fire, The Tower of the Swallow, and Lady of the Lake. Season 4 will likely cover through to the ending of The Tower of the Swallow and leave Lady of the Lake for season 5.

"This is the beginning of what fans [of the books] will know as the Hanza. It's the group traveling with Geralt for the rest of the books. This becomes his newfound family," explained series showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich. "He begins to realize that he needs help to get Yennefer and Ciri back, and when you need to help, you actually have to give of yourself as well. So, we start to watch the Hanza build and start to see that there are some amazing emotional connections to come there as well."

Based on the cast reveals so far, it looks like season 4 will probably smash together the timelines of Baptism of Fire and The Tower of the Swallow. In the books, Geralt, Ciri, and Yennefer are all separated during that time as the war between the Nilfgaardian Empire and the northern kingdoms kicks off in earnest.

After being ripped away from Ciri and Yennefer, Geralt spends time establishing a new group of unlikely comrades traversing the front lines of the war as he searches for information on Ciri's whereabouts. Yennefer is also searching for Ciri, though she gets caught up in establishing the lodge of sorceresses in the aftermath of the political upheaval that Vilgefortz dragged the magical community into. Meanwhile Ciri goes into hiding and takes the alias Falka to journey with a young group of outlaws called The Rats, later going on the run from bounty hunter Leo Bonhart.

The pacing of the novels is frankly weird at the best of times, especially in Baptism of Fire where Geralt's new group meanders for the majority of the story. I would expect for season 4 to diverge from the books and attempt to give equal time to all three main heroes. I'm speculating, but I'd bet that the show will play with the timeline of Ciri's sections so that her travels with The Rats don't get as glossed over and instead overlap more with the confrontations with Bonhart rather than leaving Ciri to tackle that part of the plot solo.

The Witcher series recaps

If you want a more detailed rehash of the story so far, you can find our episode recaps for seasons 1 and 2 below followed by a review of the first half of season 3.

Season 1 recap

1. The End's Beginning
2. Four Marks
3. Betrayer Moon
4. Of Banquets, Bastards, and Burials
5. Bottled Appetites
6. Rare Species
7. Before a Fall
8. Much More

Season 2 recap

1. A grain of truth
2. Kaer Morhen
3. What is lost
4. Redanian Intelligence
5. Turn your back
6. Dear friend
7. Voleth Meir
8. Family

Season 3 recap

Season 3 volume 1 review: An aggressive goodbye to Henry Cavill in a season full of thrills and kills

It feels like more and more studios are lining up for a swing at taking on a TV or movie adaptation. There's the Fallout series, the upcoming Devil May Cry animated Netflix show, Arcane, Castlevania, The Last of Us, and who could forget the Sonic the Hedgehog movies? But because of this saturation, Wilson admits that getting some developers on board was pretty hard, or even impossible.

"There were some IPs that we approached that were having a real big moment at that time, and Hollywood had come a calling, and three years later, nothing's happened," Wilson says. "We were going to make an episode for them, and it was going to be awesome, but Hollywood happens."

Basically, just because some videogames didn't get an episode in Secret Level, it doesn't mean that the series' creators forgot about them. Miller actually admits that he still gets a bit angry when he sees comments complaining about the lack of Halo in Secret Level: "Man, you think that we didn't talk to Halo?"

According to both Wilson and Miller, the creative director at id Software is actually a good friend, making Halo was actually one of the first games that they pitched for. "We made a big plea because one of the things both Tim [Miller] and I would love to do is do something that isn't currently available in the games," Wilson says. "We wanted to make a Master Chief/Doom Slayer crossover episode, and I spent a whole weekend crafting this impassioned letter of my childhood. And it's exactly what Tim said; they were like, 'Nah.'"

A Master Chief/Doom Slayer crossover episode does sound sick. But as Halo, like many others, already has its own series, I can see why the developers decided to turn this offer down. It's just a shame that the existing Halo series sucked and was canceled after just two seasons.

Despite not managing to get every game on their wishlist, Miller and Wilson both ascertain that they are more than happy with all the current games involved in Secret Level. "There are no black-and-white choices here," Miller says. "It's not like we could just have anything we wanted, or they were all available. There are lots of different reasons. We did the best we could, and I love all the games that we have."

This isn't to say that some developers couldn't change their mind, ready for the next season of Secret Level. Another game that Miller begged for was Half-Life, and while it obviously wasn't greenlit for the first season, there's nothing to say it won't make an appearance in later seasons, except maybe for the common knowledge that Valve never really seems up to delivering on Half-Life hopes, but I can dream.

Bloomberg reported that the amounts that Netflix and Tencent paid Riot less than half of the $250 million it cost to make the series. Bloomberg also claimed that four people who were familiar with Arcane's production said that Riot didn't have a plan to recoup the lost revenue.

Despite Riot firing 11% of its staff earlier this year, Riot's co-founder Marc "Tryndamere" Merrill says that as far as they are concerned, Arcane was a huge success:

"People who look at the world through a short-term, transactional, cynical lens really struggle to understand Riot. This has been true with various people trying to claim that high-quality free games won't work, that esports will never work, that our music was insane, and are now saying that Arcane wasn't awesome and worth it.

"These people think we make things like Arcane to sell skins when, in reality, we sell skins to make things like Arcane. Riot is a mission-driven company where Rioters are constantly striving to make it better to be a player. That is why we have successfully done that over and over again across multiple games and now multiple businesses/mediums—games, sports, music & animation. Do we get everything right? Nope. But we are not focused on the short-term extraction of profits—we are focused on delivering exceptional value to our audience over the long term, again and again and again. To be clear, Arcane crushed for players, and so it crushed for us."

Riot's renowned for its incredibly expensive skins. Earlier this year, it released a $500 Ahri skin and then later fired the artist responsible for making it, as well as announcing a new exalted skins tier list days after even more layoffs, which see players having to roll the dice for nicer skins. Considering how much money Arcane costs, it's not really that surprising that Riot is using its skins made for whales to fund creative projects like series.

However, Arcane couldn't have been that much of a car crash. Riot recently confirmed that it is looking into making more League of Legends-inspired shows that will explore three new regions: Noxus, Ionia, and Demacia. I think we'll probably see Noxus next after the Swain teaser at the end of the last Arcane episode, but honestly, after the superb quality of Arcane's second season, I would be happy with just about anything.

According to Variety, Amazon said that Secret Level's first week was its most-watched animated series debut of all time.

Aside from the announcement, though, there's no information on what games will be featured in Secret Level's second season, when it might debut, or how long it'll be. Unless it's already in-progress it'll take some time to coordinate all those licensing deals.

Season 1 of secret level had a lot of stars for what it was—Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kevin Hart, Keanu Reeves, Temuera Morrison, Emily Swallow, Merle Dandridge, Claudia Doumit, Clive Standen, and Laura Bailey, among others. It had episodes about Dungeons & Dragons, Sifu, New World, Unreal Tournament, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, Crossfire, Armored Core, The Outer Worlds, Mega Man, Exodus, Spelunky, Concord, Honor of Kings, Playtime, and one exceptionally weird one about Pac-Man.

For all that the PC Gamer team was... not impressed by the results. A mere five of the 15 episodes rated a 3/5 or better on PC Gamer's very informal round robin take on a Secret Level review.

Plus, there's a whole awkward episode dedicated to high-profile failure Concord, the very expensive and very public game that released this year before walking itself back into nothingness. PC Gamer's Tyler Wild said it was "like a message from a ghost whose unfinished business is creating a global multimedia franchise."

That's one hell of a team-up. Pacific Drive was my favorite survival game of this year, challenging you to make your way through a deadly anomalous exclusion zone in Washington State with only the help of a clunky old station wagon. It's hectic and scary and oozing with atmosphere, which feels like it's right in Wan's horror wheelhouse. Wan has also directed mainstream action blockbusters like Furious 7, so he's got plenty of car experience, and the Aquaman films, so he's got… I don't know, water experience? Let's go with that. It rains a lot in the Pacific Northwest.

I'd say the biggest challenge for a Pacific Drive show is coming up with a main character. In the game you're just a mute driver and your station wagon is the star of the show. There are characters who guide you through the world via radio, but it's mostly just you and a car, and the car has far, far more personality than you do. All those blanks are gonna have to be filled in, hopefully with an interesting and well-written character.

Atmospherically, I think it's a great choice for a series. The Pacific Northwest is a beautiful region and those thick forests and towering trees can already feel a bit unsettling in a sort of gorgeous way. The anomalies from the game varied from spooky to scary to downright terrifying, so there's plenty to work with for a horror show. Pacific Drive also trickles a lot of lore your way while you explore, so there's plenty to draw on from the source material.

According to Variety, Wan and Michael Clear (executive producer of recent horror show Teacup and the 2024 remake of Salem's Lot) will executive produce the Pacific Drive series. Atomic Monster has acquired the rights to develop the show, but we don't know when or where it will air yet: no streaming service or network partner has been announced.

With that said, the information we have on Fallout season 2 is next to none right now. We can draw a few conclusions going off what we know about returning characters and the ending of the first season, but for the most part it's a lot of speculation. At the end of season one, we got a huge hint toward the next season revolving around New Vegas. That alone gives us a reasonable amount of information to dissect and build an idea from. But for now, here's what we know about Fallout season 2.

Is there a Fallout season 2 release date?

There is no release date for Fallout season 2 yet. But we do know that the second season was greenlit in April 2024 after the first season aired, and filming for season 2 was scheduled to begin in November 2024. That makes a 2025 release date possible, but it's a bit of a stretch. So early to mid-2026 may be a more reasonable expectation. Since filming has just begun, I imagine we won't see a trailer for the season for a while yet. That would be the biggest indicator of the season wrapping up and a release date coming soon, but that also seems a significant way off currently.

Who's in the cast of Fallout season 2?

With so little information about the season as a whole, it's not really surprising that we still have so much to learn about the cast. We know that the three main characters will be returning with Purnell, Goggins, and Moten in their roles. Choudhury and Uggams have both made statements in interviews indicating that they'll be back for season 2 as well. Here's the full list of confirmed cast so far:

• Ella Purnell - Lucy MacLean
• Walton Goggins - The Ghoul / Cooper Howard
• Aaron Moten - Knight Maximus
• Sarita Choudhury - Moldaver
• Leslie Uggams - Overseer Betty
• Macaulay Culkin - unannounced

The one wild card so far is Macaulay Culkin, who's been confirmed cast but without a character name announced. According to Deadline's report, he'll be playing "a crazy genius-type character." That doesn't tell us much but I'd put my money on him being a weirdo who turns up in New Vegas during Lucy and The Ghoul's portion of the story rather than some Brotherhood of Steel scientist.

Though unconfirmed, there are several characters who seem highly likely to turn up in season 2. Lucy's father and brother both seem like shoe-ins, as does Hank's missing wife Barb. We've also seen Squire Thaddeus survive the wasteland so far and his new ghoulish properties mean he's likely to stagger into season 2 as a continued source of comedic relief and macguffin-ing. Here's our list of likely returning characters for Fallout season 2:

• Kyle MacLachlan – Hank MacLean
• Moisés Arias – Norm MacLean
• Frances Turner - Barb Howard
• Johnny Pemberton - Thaddeus

What's the plot for Fallout season 2?

Even though we don't know anything like a release date, we know that Fallout season 2 is going to have two things for certain: New Vegas and Deathclaws. Based on the ending of Fallout Season 1, we're expecting New Vegas to play a heavy role in Season 2 since it was the only city not destroyed by a nuclear blast. But, we don't know what this setting entails other than what we already know from Fallout: New Vegas.

New Vegas isn't the only iconic piece of Fallout history we imagine we'll see this season either. For example, co-showrunner Graham Wagner explained, “We wanted to get deathclaws, but we didn’t want to just throw it away. It’s such a monumental piece, we want to save something for season 2 to be able to do it properly, not just added onto the massive world-building we had to do already in season 1. So season 2, we’re very excited to finally tackle one of the most iconic elements of the games.”

This does make me curious to see what other iconic Fallout elements they will cram into the second season since the team was so conscious of overloading the season with all the good stuff and leaving nothing to build the world of its successor.

Deathclaws will be a significantly intimidating addition to the derelict landscape of New Vegas, and hopefully, we get a good look at them in the first trailer for season 2. But, for now, you'll have to let your imagination conjure up what you think they'll look like and how they'll fit into the world already constructed in Fallout.

After explaining that Fallout's showrunners weren't there to accept the award because they're working on Fallout season two ("Whoooo," came the audience response), Nolan thanked a number of people including Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins, the rest of the cast and crew, Amazon, and Kilter Films.

"I want to thank the fans of New Vegas for not burning my house to the ground," Nolan added, which drew another cheer. "You'll be very happy you didn't."

Nolan was referring to the uproar among dedicated fans when the show played fast and loose with the lore and timeline of the Fallout series, specifically, the most beloved Fallout of all: New Vegas. I won't recap the whole ordeal for you—because I already did it when the show aired.

Nolan also thanked Todd Howard, saying the team at Bethesda "were absolutely the most incredible collaborators you could possibly imagine."

Howard then stepped up to the mic to thank Nolan, as well as the cast and crew, and "everybody at Bethesda that I've worked with on Fallout for 20 years now, it's been incredible. We are so blessed with the best fans there are. Thank you for supporting everything we do."

You can watch the entire award segment below:

The episode, which I've seen in advance of the show's premiere, was supposed to come out in a world where Concord was, if not a Helldivers 2-level hit, a popular and well-liked game. In reality, Concord barely lasted a week. Sony quickly shut the competitive multiplayer game down due to lack of interest, and then shuttered developer Firewalk Studios, which it had acquired partway through Concord's development.

I played Concord and I thought it was fun enough, and it was technically sound, but its Bungie-influenced arena shooter stylings just didn't draw a crowd, and neither did its all-in commitment to building a Guardians of the Galaxy-like sci-fi universe with weekly cutscenes. They were going to follow the exploits of a crew of Freegunners—Concord's name for its roguish space mercenaries—whose realistically-rendered faces were a little uncanny.

The Secret Level episode portrays the most important moment in the history of the Freegunners, when a heroic crew of outlaws stole a map of navigation routes that allow free travel through the galaxy for enemies of The Guild, a powerful policing body.

At the end of the short adventure, we jump to a space pub in the present of Concord's timeline, where the legendary story has just been retold. There, we glimpse the arm of one of Concord's mascots—Lennox, the green guy—and of course we're supposed to think, 'Hey, I know that guy!' But no one does know much about the character, outside of his creators. What we got of Concord's story from the first trailers and cutscenes tell us that he's a daredevil who really loves hot sauce, but there were supposed to have been over a dozen more in-game cinematics by now.

The episode comes across like a transmission from a spirit that doesn't know it's dead yet, one that still believes everything went right for Concord and the new game studio. It's the 13th episode of the series—unlucky, eh?—and it'll drop on December 17, although I found its eerie context more notable than the short story itself.

Concord is far from the only multiplayer game—or game in general—to struggle or crater this year, although it was the most dramatic impact event. We just learned that Ubisoft isn't going to keep trying to build an audience for free-to-play shooter XDefiant, and it's been an unprecedented year for studio closures and layoffs. More than 300 developers lost their jobs just this week, and thousands more jobs were cut this year.

As for the rest of Secret Level, we watched and rated each episode and liked some of them, but on the whole, the animated shorts didn't charm us much.

The episodes are fairly short, running around 10–12 minutes each. It feels like brevity should be a virtue here—who wants an hour-long Pac-Man joke?—but they actually wind up feeling too slight in many cases.

We divvied up the episodes between us and watched 'em all. Below you'll find our quickie reviews plus a 1–5 rating on a scale befitting each episode. You can check out the show yourself when it begins streaming on Prime Video on December 10.

Episode 1: Dungeons & Dragons

This didn't quite work for me. I think the thing that made last year's D&D movie work so well was that it understood that D&D is fundamentally a bit silly. Get too self-serious with it, as this episode does, and you just end up with something that feels like an intro cutscene from a forgotten action RPG.

There's lots of cool visuals on display, no doubt, but I think this episode was always going to need more than that. With properties like Warhammer 40,000 and Spelunky, there's a novelty just in seeing them represented in a big budget, cinematic way. But when it comes to fantasy adventurers, dragons, and magic, we've seen all that in shiny CG a million times before. It needed to really lean into what makes D&D unique and interesting to stand out, and a surprise at the end of this episode wasn't enough to achieve that.

There are some interesting characters in the party—the stoic dwarf monk is fun, and I'd have loved to see more of the episode's orc druid wildshaping in battle. But what an odd choice to devote most of the screentime to a stereotypically dour paladin—I'm guessing the creators didn't realise that the reason so many players pick that class is just for the overpowered smite attacks, not the dull piousness. —Robin Valentine, Senior Editor

Rating: 2/5 saving throws

Episode 2: Sifu

The best thing I can say about this episode is that it made me want to replay the game. It's a brief fight scene bookended by a bit of rumination on how we spend our lives, basically an ultra-condensed version of the game itself. The fight is quite true to Sifu's action movie-style martial arts combat, which is some of the best ever put in a game, but it's not the kind of thing I really want to watch someone else play. If you find yourself wanting to grab the imaginary controller out of the show's hands and do a better job beating up nightclub goons, then go play Sifu. —Tyler Wilde, US Editor-in Chief

Rating: 2/5 punches

Episode 3: New World

I'm tired of animated projects using the biggest movie stars they can get instead of hiring performers who are genuinely talented in voice acting, but it's hard to argue with the casting of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a boastful, stupid, self-absorbed jackass of a king in the New World episode.

There are a lot of well-timed gags, fun references to respawning and NPC trainers, and even a nod to one of Arnold's memes as he's taught important lessons over and over and stubbornly refuses to learn from any of them. "You're pretty bad at doin' things," his servant says just before the king once again runs off to do more things, badly. –Christopher Livingston, Senior Editor

Rating: 4/5 choppas

Episode 4: Unreal Tournament

I have some truly fond memories of staying up all night playing Unreal Tournament, and I mean all night. Until the sun came up and I realized I had to go to work on absolutely no sleep. Secret Level's UT episode doesn't exactly rekindle those fires for me, but the action sequences (it is almost entirely action sequences) are good, and the two things I wanted to see most, my favorite weapon and one very special, utterly iconic map, both make an appearance. No complaints here. —Christopher Livingston

Rating: 4/5 telefrags

Episode 5: Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2

If this sequel to Space Marine 2 is trying to give us some insight into its protagonist, Titus, by flashing back to his childhood, it doesn't really work. He comes off as another stoic killing machine—just like the other marines—rather than the 40K equivalent of a rookie cop who breaks the rules but gets the job done, which is how he comes across in the games.

But that doesn't really matter, because it succeeds as a combat showcase full of gory deaths, and gives Chaos all the personality the Ultramarines lack. The cultists are straight out of Mad Max and look like they're having a great time right up until the second they get messily dispatched, and the mutated sorceress is super unsettling, especially the way her wing-like limbs fold away.

It doesn't really need to be connected to Space Marine 2 at all, and would have worked just as well without the videogame link. I haven't seen a 40K fight with this much grand guignol gusto and eerie oddness since the Astartes animation. —Jody Macgregor, Weekend/AU Editor

Rating: 4/5 skulls

Episode 6: Pac-Man

Of all the episodes of Secret Level I've seen, this is by far the weirdest. And it's no accident: according to the show's creators, Bandai Namco said "We would like audiences to wonder what the f**k they did with Pac-Man." I daresay that goal has been achieved with an unusual and gruesome take on the iconic dot-gobbling circle. I don't really understand the episode and it seems barely connected to the game, but that's what I like about it. —Christopher Livingston

Rating: 4/5 Clydes

Episode 7: Crossfire

Do you like badass operators saying badass things and all sharing the same personality: badass? They yell a lot of stuff like "Lost visual!" and refer to the person they're escorting as the "Package," that sorta thing? I don't know much about Crossfire except that it's a Counter-Strike-like, but this doesn't make me want to play it or even learn more about it. The episode is one of the longest in the series but mostly feels like a trailer for a direct-to-streaming action film starring, I dunno, Frank Grillo, that you never watch because you don't subscribe to Starz. —Christopher Livingston

Rating: 1/5 Packages

Episode 8: Armored Core

It dawns on me that the problem with the nearly realistic style of imagery and animation in some of these episodes is that they are reminiscent of videogame cutscenes, and why would I want to spend more time watching videogame cutscenes than I already do? Anyway, Keanu Reeves is a hard-drinkin', hard-livin' rough and tumble burnout who grunts and growls and talks to a voice in his head, and it's hard not to feel like I've already seen him do that for about 30 hours in a game already. Because I have. —Christopher Livingston

Rating: 1/5 Silverhands

Episode 9: The Outer Worlds

This episode works for a while, giving me the urge to dive back into the colorful and satirically corporate-run universe of The Outer Worlds. A lovelorn nobody submits to horrible product testing experiments in hopes of reuniting with a scientist he simps for, which is grimly entertaining, but then it takes a stab at sentimentality and misses. I blame Pixar for making everyone think they need to aim for the heartstrings when a simply entertaining story is plenty. —Christopher Livingston

Rating: 3/5 saltunas

Episode 10: Mega Man

This one has that uncannily smooth, hyper-cute look that permeates ArtStation. Something weirder would've been welcome. The length of these episodes feels like more of a problem the more of them I watch. They're so slight—this one's just seven minutes—that they can wind up feeling like advertisements instead of short films. This one seems aimed at introducing kids to the concept of Mega Man rather than pleasing fans of the series, who are mostly probably in their 40s. —Tyler Wilde

Rating: 1/5 arm cannons

Episode 11: Exodus

Look, I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this. It's an episode about a sci-fi game no one has played that bounces around so many planets and characters and factions it needs near-constant narration to keep up with, which ain't great for a 10-minute show. One guy has some kinda cyberbog leopard bodyguard, though. That was cool. —Christopher Livingston

Rating: 1/5 large loyal cybercats

Episode 12: Spelunky

I guess Spelunky isn't a bad place to explore the concept of repeatedly dying and starting over and what that means to a character in a videogame. Why does it happen? How does it happen? After dozens or hundreds of deaths and rebirths, would it take a mental toll? But this segment fails to capture the hilarity and ruthlessness of Spelunky's systems, and worse, it attempts to craft a heartwarming message that feels completely incongruent to the game. Like me missing a jump in Spelunky, this episode falls flat. —Christopher Livingston

Rating: 1/5 angry shopkeepers

Episode 13: Concord

I was hoping this episode would blow me away, just for the dramatic irony, but Concord's message from beyond the grave was clearly meant for an audience that's already in love with Concord's universe, which doesn't exist because the game was canned days after launch. —Tyler Wilde

Rating: 2/5 quirky aliens

Episode 14: Honor of Kings

I don't know much about Honor of Kings other than that it's a mobile MOBA, so I'm not sure how relevant to the game this episode is. I do love the idea of a massive living city controlled by an AI that appears to be breaking down, but the episode gets almost immediately bogged down with exposition, a bit of a problem since it's only 15 minutes long. —Christopher Livingston

Rating: 2/5 board games played to decide someone's fate

Episode 15: PlayStation

A bike courier is chased by Sony characters from another dimension: If you're trying to manufacture a PlayStation mascot team-up, it's not a bad premise. It still comes off as a long advertisement, and I expected to see some deeper cuts in a 10-minute parade of references. —Tyler Wilde

Rating: 2/5 PlayStation exclusives

In a chat this week with the creators of Secret Level, however, I really only wanted to ask about a single episode based on an iconic game character:

Pac-Man.

I'm not going to spoil anything about the Pac-Man episode of Secret Level, but I will say it's probably about the last thing you'd ever expect from an animated feature about a yellow circle that gobbles dots and gets chased by ghosts. The episode is weird and gruesome and a huge departure from the game itself. Turns out, Bandai Namco was totally into that.

"They challenged us from the jump," said Dave Wilson, Secret Level's supervising director and executive producer. "We got on the call with the developers at Bandai, and the translated mission statement was: 'We would like audiences to wonder what the fuck they did with Pac Man.' And so we were like, no problem."

Mission accomplished, I'd say. Again, no spoilers, but I definitely wound up wondering that exact thing while watching.

"They get script approval," Wilson said when I asked how involved the studio was. "They saw everything." Wilson thinks they only got a single note from Bandai Namco on the episode, about the placement of a logo. "Other than that, it was whatever we want to do."

I asked if other studios were just as willing to let Secret Level go completely ham on their beloved characters and game worlds.

"I think it runs the gamut from folks that really want to closely manage the process to folks who say, 'look, we trust you, just go with God," creator and executive producer Tim Miller said. "But our company, Blur [Studio], has been doing this for almost 30 years now, and primarily in the game industry. So we have a lot of trust built up with folks that we're going to handle their IP carefully, and we're not going to go off and do terrible things to it.

"I don't think the show would be possible without that [trust], because, honestly, many of them are busy making games," Miller said. "They don't have time to babysit us."

Secret Level begins airing on December 10 on Prime TV.

As someone with a passable knowledge of League of Legends lore, when I first started watching Arcane, I didn't think it would have much in the way of surprises. Sure, we'd get more of a window into these characters' backstory than ever before, but it was all just heading in the direction of the status quo in LoL and its various spin-offs, right?

Yeah… no. If anyone was still harbouring that belief by the end of season one, season two will certainly have sunk it, with its wild changes to a few key characters and handful of emotional deaths. In fact, the opposite has proven to be true—the canon of the show has overridden the canon of the games in many instances now, with season two in particular heralding a controversial redesign of champion Viktor from cyborg supervillain into magical prophet.

As it turns out, all bets were off right from the start, with Riot granting the creative team huge freedom over the story—and even allowing them to kill off anyone they liked. That's according to Amanda Overton, who wrote on the first season and returned as an executive story editor on the second.

"Riot embraced whatever story we wanted to tell with any of the characters," she told our good friends over at GamesRadar+. "We were like 'Can we kill Jayce and Viktor?' 'Yes'. There were no limits to what we could do to make a good story, which was, in my opinion, absolutely the right choice for them to do, because we are adapting a game into a different medium, into television, and you want to be able to be free to make that version the best it can possibly be."

Though longtime fans may resent some of the changes made as a result, it's hard to argue with the results—the show has been an enormous hit, and a large part of that is the depth invested in the characters.

"That support from [Riot's] side really allowed us to make characters like this—complicated, interesting, dark, vulnerable—that had fates that we needed to decide what would be the most satisfying for the show, and not worry about what may or may not be interesting for a different medium," she says.

And apparently it was always the plan for that to reflect back into the game itself. Overton points to how "mobile, and moving, and changeable" League of Legends is as a key difference between Arcane and other videogame adaptations.

"It's updating all the time, it changes, it's a very nimble, changing game. And so there isn't a lot of opportunity to have an adaptation of a game to then also be able to change the game or adapt the game. The Last of Us can't do that, The Witcher can't do that. Any game adaptation that we've seen recently doesn't have that relationship with League that Arcane does."

Given that the story of Arcane, right up to the end of season two, was apparently planned as early as six years ago, that means Viktor's League of Legends redesign has likely been on the agenda for almost as long, as well as the various major transformations and deaths in the show.

On the other hand… how many of those fates do we actually think will stick anyway? Particularly when it comes to deaths, it seemed to me that for almost all of them, the door was left wide open for the character to return (or revert) if Riot ever needs them again.

Still, it's certainly interesting to see a TV show leading the way so strongly for a connected videogame universe. I don't know if I'm entirely convinced that the company is successfully uniting all of its canon yet, as it promised last year, but it's certainly being bold with it, no matter how many Viktor mains it upsets along the way.

Namely, some fans felt that the season's finale was a mite rushed, being a mostly standard-length episode where everything gets tied up in a bow faster than fabric in a bow-making factory. This particular rumour mill hasn't been helped by interview asides made by co-creator Christian Linke, who has said in interviews that he'd have liked a bit more time to wrap up certain arcs.

I've been a medium amount of skeptical that anything nefarious went on behind the scenes, especially given Arcane had a very high budget (although still not too far above most animated movies in terms of watch-hours) for production and marketing both. Now, Linke's taken to Reddit to set the record straight (thanks, Gamesradar):

"Some theories are a bit too far out there," writes Linke, before having to come out and state that one conspiracy—that the showrunners asked Foritche for a feature-length finale and got rejected, is right out: "It's quite the opposite, our scripts are always shorter than what Fortiche ends up proposing in the story board phase. We wanna let them get inspired and roam free, so we can then reel it in while also allowing for the magical moments to find themselves. It's a tight creative collaboration, not some sort of 'alright vendor company, do your work, achieve the impossible, but do it quickly!'"

The corporate greed angle, Linke says, is also a heap of nothing: "Yes, there are always constraints, both in budget and time. That's part of our job as creatives, to work within those constraints. Constraints are NORMAL, and they were always generous, and I always had final say on anything creative. But they do exist. They also existed during Season 1."

I think that's fair enough—while the show's first season saw praise along the lines of 'this is what happens when you give artists all the time and money they want', fact of the matter is, if you're making anything for cash, it's gonna have a deadline. Sometimes it'll have a deadline even if you aren't getting paid, just because you'd like to finish the thing someday. Riot was generous by comparison, but its patience and budget isn't infinite, and, more to the point, neither was the patience of the people animating the show.

"It would have been great to have more time to work on this second season, or extra time to add to the episodes, but we didn't have it. For a number of reasons. Budget being one. We have been EXTREMELY lucky … NOBODY ELSE gets these types of budgets. Please don't forget that.

"Time being the other constraint … There's a release window that a massive amount of people work towards, not just at Fortiche, but also at Riot on different games, at Netflix, brand partners. Even key talent that works on the show that, simply put, is getting tired cranking away at this incredibly long season and project over multiple years."

In other words—nothing lasts forever, and no creative endeavour comes out perfect. That might leave a bit of a sting to those expecting some kind of transcendental storytelling nirvana out of Arcane's second season, but for me, my rotten little heart loves imperfect and wonky stories. I'm also glad Fortiche, a studio I want to see make other stuff, hasn't burned itself out completely in the pursuit of passion.

"It's not perfect. You don't take these types of hefty swings and expect that everything wraps up perfectly with a neat bow tie. It grows and evolves in its own way, and it becomes what it becomes." While I do appreciate Linke's transparency here, I do think now that he's said his piece it's time to log off for a minute—you categorically can't please everyone. Besides, it ain't over until the fatcats stop funding a big animated League of Legends universe. I think that's how the saying goes, anyway.

Statham is the celebrity star of this year's World of Tanks Holiday Ops event, and Wargaming offered us the opportunity to ask the actor a handful of questions by email, mediated by the developer. We slipped in a few non-tank-related inquiries, and along with telling us whether he could beat Santa in a fight (he thinks he could), Statham answered a couple questions about the Crank movies, which to my mind are the most memorable films he's appeared in—and to draw an admittedly loose connection to PC gaming, pretty videogame-like (you even used to be able to buy Crank 2 on Steam).

The first Crank, released in 2006, casts the action star as a hitman named Chev who has to give himself a constant adrenaline rush or die by synthetic poison. In the sequel, Crank 2: High Voltage, Chev has to shock himself to charge the internal battery of an artificial heart. They're like Speed with all responsibility to others stripped out—cynical, myopic, frantic.

Both movies were directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the duo that later made Gamer with Gerard Butler. I put to Statham that the Crank movies have some videogame-like features themselves.

"Yes, I agree. To me, the Crank films have some elements of videogames," wrote Statham. "First, there's Chev—this high-adrenaline character who's up against waves of enemies all at once. He's never stopping, throwing punches, dodging attacks, and using all sorts of skills to take down whoever gets in his way. He's 'leveling up' as he goes, figuring out new ways to fight, survive, and push forward.

"Second, if you think of it like a game, Crank is a movie about keeping that health bar full. Chev's gotta keep moving forward, like a shark, to keep his heart going strong and his health 'in the green.'"

A third Crank hasn't been confirmed, and Neveldine and Taylor haven't made a film together since Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, but the Crank-heads out there remain expectant. I asked Statham if he's got any ideas of his own for what premise might drive Chev forward if they ever made a Crank 3. He stayed on message by offering a tank-related scenario.

"There's really no idea too crazy to get tossed out," wrote Statham. "If Crank 3 ever happens, I'm both pumped and a bit wary about what they'll throw at me.

"Who knows? They could put me in a tank powered by a hybrid engine, generating energy as I roll through anything in my way. That's how they could keep Chev's heart beating faster. Honestly, I think Chev would be up for it."

Yeah, why not—I'm down. Staying on the topic of tanks, the World of Tanks Holiday Ops event will bring Statham into the game on December 6—you can find details on the official World of Tanks site.

"I aim to present a new dimension of cinematic adaptation that goes beyond merely turning a game into a live-action movie," Kojima says in an interview with Variety. I honestly have no idea how Kojima plans to go about this and what going beyond a videogame adaptation means.

Maybe the hope is that the Death Stranding movie is just more than a decent videogame flick, but I'm not sure that's a high bar anymore. Sure, the Borderlands film was a pretty irredeemable mess, and the latest trailers for the upcoming Minecraft movie don't look much better, but there have been some truly great adaptations this year when it comes to TV.

Just off the top of my head, the second season of Arcane and the recent Netflix series Castlevania: Nocturne were both absolutely stellar shows. Both of these are more than just videogame adaptations; they are, in their own right, fantastic series that don't rely on the novelty of their gaming roots to score points. I think that's probably what Kojima is going for, but then again, I'm not a genius seeking to reinvent cinema.

Although creating a live-action Death Stranding may not be too hard, as Kojima also admits he has a pretty solid foundation for making games with hours of cutscenes "My work is often regarded as being similar to a movie, but at the core, games are what I create." While the idea he just makes movies is a little harsh—Death Stranding is absolutely a videogame you can sit down and play—it's not entirely unfair, especially considering just how many Hollywood celebrities turn up in it with their own digitised faces.

"For 50 years, Shadow's been in a state of suspended animation," intones Reeves, solemnly, "he's coming out of it seeking revenge."

Jim Carrey—who plays Dr Robotnik—reckons Reeves is the perfect man for the role. "Shadow's got this brooding kind of darkness that Keanu has mastered so brilliantly," he says, of a character who is the evil twin of Sonic the Hedgehog with a gun.

It sounds like Reeves almost went method to get himself into the mindspace of gaming's most Byronic hedgehog. It was an "internal journey," says the actor, "to get to the anger and the emotion. It was intense."

I have to say, we see a few snippets of Reeves' performance in the video, and he sure sounds like Keanu Reeves. You could tell me these were clips left on CD Projekt Red's floor from his stint as Johnny Silverhand and I'd absolutely believe it. If Reeves had to go on a voyage to the centre of the self, or climb to the top of a mountain to consult the sages in order to properly inhabit the persona of Evil Sonic, I dunno that I could tell. I say this as a Keanu-liker, and someone who thinks he gets unfairly dinged for his acting.

You can tell he's actually a good actor because he's able to say "Sonic 3 and playing Shadow, it's really on another level" entirely without smirking. And look, I understand: these actors are promoting a movie. They're not gonna come out and say they're only there because they got offered an enormous paycheque—I, too, would have voiced Shadow the Hedgehog if Sega offered me more money than god has—but it is slightly surreal to watch people like Idris Elba and Keanu Reeves sit down and talk up the dramatic bona fides of the Sonic movie.

Anyway, it sounds like Reeves really got into it, so look out for Sonic the Hedgehog 3 to hit cinemas this December 20, where it will make 400 trillion dollars.

"I mean, the conceptual stage has various stages of advancement, so we're for sure further in than we were a year ago, but we're also not yet at the stage where we would be shopping around the concept to potential streamers or studios," Michal Nowakowski, CD Projekt joint CEO says (via VGC). "I'd say it's probably a similar window between here and now as was between when we announced it about a year ago and today, so within that window, I would expect we’re going to get to shopping [it] around."

That last part about how the project is at a similar window seems like something I'd say to a teacher at school after I forgot to hand in my homework. Even if this project is likely something that will eventually fall outside of CD Projekt's studios, as it'll be up to the production company to get the ball rolling, it doesn't sound like it's received a lot of attention.

On the other hand, we finally got word that The Witcher 4 is in full production during CD Projekt's latest financial update. "I'm pleased to announce that several weeks ago [Polaris] moved to full-scale production," chief financial officer Piotr Nielubowicz said. "Of all our projects, this one is currently the most far along, and we're starting the most intensive phase of development. I wish to thank the team for its effort, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed for further progress." See, that's how you get straight to the point.

Nielubowicz also confirmed during this update that CD Projekt will partner with Netflix to make a new Cyberpunk animated project. Although, this isn't major news as Netflix had previously teased another Cyberpunk collaboration with CD Projekt back in September, during Geeked Week.

All in all, CD Projekt definitely has its hands full for the foreseeable future. But even still, I can't help but hope for some more concrete evidence the Cyberpunk live-action adaptation is actually happening and not just something that'll get indefinitely pushed back as the years go on and other projects pile up.

While I'm of the opinion that Fortiche is the master of storytelling so dense it gets stuck in your teeth, co-creator Christian Linke hints at the idea that there were, indeed, words left unsaid or cut for time. That's as per what he says in Arcane's "Afterglow" series, featuring himself and fellow creator Alex Yee, as well as actors Hailee Steinfeld (Vi), Ella Purnell (Jinx), Reed Shannon (Ekko). Spoilers for Season 2 ahead.

As a quick recap, Jayce managed to convince his totally-platonic science pal Viktor that his glorious evolution was going a bit overboard, with the two vanishing into the ether. As Linke reveals, they're probably not coming back: "I would say that they have unfortunately disintegrated."

What's more, Linke would've loved to explore their relationship more, saying that "to me, the Jayce/Viktor ending—to a certain degree it feels unresolved, because even though there is an understanding for them in the end, I just always feel like more should be said, and they should experience more together. But we're not given the time."

While that might set off alarm bells in your head, I don't think this necessarily means that Linke and Yee were cut off from the story they wanted to tell, or anything. "Kill your darlings" is writing advice for a reason. Not every story needs every single idea you have for it, nor can it fit every idea you care about. It's entirely possible that Linke is simply speaking from a place of writer's woe, even if what was cut needed to be cut for the story to work.

Mind, a recent interview with Techradar does raise an eyebrow or two on my end. Linke notes that, in response to the season's detractors, "there's a specific pace and a specific way we did things in season one … we wanted to do things a little differently in season two. So, yeah, I understand that, I respect that, and I want to learn from that." Very curious indeed.

At the very least, it looks like fans aren't knee-deep in cope about Jinx's survival after all. When asked if she lived, Purnell adopts a ruinously poor poker face, says "um, we don't know" then hides behind the question card, adding "we're gonna leave that open to interpretation." Yeah, I think she made it, folks. I'm excited to see her again, whether it's just a quick cameo in whatever Fortiche is cooking next or not.

There's very little nuance in these spaces, either. Lukewarm criticisms become rallying cries for critique wars, clever soundbytes echo in on themselves, and before you know it people are hurling pitchforks like harpoons and spray-painting their teeth silver. Nonetheless, I’m of the opinion this finale deserves some full-throated celebration. I'm gonna get into spoiler territory from here on out, so go watch the show if you haven't already.

Arcane season two's ending was never going to please everybody, that much is for certain. When you get (rightfully) lauded as some of the best prestige TV animation that's graced the silver screen, the weight of expectation is going to rest heavily on your shoulders. However, I think Arcane ended in the only way it could've—loud, beautiful, and packed denser than a black hole.

Episode 7. That's it, that's the header

This episode has escaped the most criticism out of the season's third act (Netflix releases them in three-episode batches). It balances Ekko's heartbreaking journey through the 'good' timeline, where hextech was never invented, with Jayce's hilariously no-good terrible bad day in the hell dimension—all with its usual finesse. There's barely anything to critique here. The dialogue's tight, the visuals are breathtaking, and the stakes are reaching their peak.

However, this episode has two great examples of the kind of bastard (affectionate) behaviour Fortiche is known for, and it's why I think Arcane Season 2 is likely to improve in the eyes of its detractors over time, as long as they give it a second watch under a microscope.

First up, Ekko says: "I was playing with inversions on Jayce's acceleration rune" while drawing a big ol' chalk circle around the rune we see Jayce carrying on his wrist. The same rune he was given by the mysterious mage in his past, who turns out to be a regretful Viktor from Jayce's doomed dimension. This lays a whole heap of significance on episode 9's reveal—that being, Viktor gave a ton of different runes to Jayce at random, leading to a lot of doomed realities.

In the reality we're following, though, Jayce gets the acceleration rune, which leads to Ekko discovering time travel—letting him intervene in Episode 9, which buys Jayce enough time to convince his wayward Ultron boyfriend to not go all hivemind.

Secondly, Heimerdinger notes that the hexcore flung them all to different time periods—while he does theorise that Jayce might've ended up in a different timeline, there's no real confirmation of that. At the end of the episode, alt-universe Powder puts a blue rose necklace next to a bag of hexcore crystals.

This is where I wade, fearlessly, into headcanon territory: I don't think Jayce got sent to a different timeline at all, he just got sent way into the future. The crystals still exist, meaning Viktor can still eventually discover hextech and begin his glorious evolution. Moreover, blue roses often symbolise the unattainable. The necklace has both Powder and Ekko's faces on it.

In other words, a symbol of unattainable love between two characters is (despite the fact they're still alive and well in this timeline) placed right next to the very thing that eventually dooms all others. This is a studio that's meticulous about detail, and there are no accidental frames. I am shaking my fist ruefully at the sky and cursing Fortiche's name.

While I think episode 7 is definitely the strongest, it's also my opinion that all three of the last act's episodes are packed with little details that'll start taking root on second, third, and fourth watches. Let's start with the most obvious one.

She ain't dead

Jinx isn't dead—this might seem like cope, but I am 900% certain that's the case. While she gets her big sacrificial Disney death, we also see Caitlyn holding one of her bombs and smiling ruefully at a blueprint of the exact shaft she supposedly 'died' in, the camera even panning to a vent where she could've conceivably escaped.

We then see an exact shot-for-shot replica of an airship from episode one, season one—where Powder said: "One day, I'm gonna ride in one of those things." If that wasn't enough, we get a 'the end' stinger in Jinx's scratchy style, and you can even slow down the initial explosion frame-by-frame and see a pink line zipping away from it. I mean, c'mon.

I'm engaging in prophecy here, but as fans with more free time than me and a ravenous eye for secrets comb through this season frame by frame, I think we're going to see a lot of the bickering simmer down. Arcane's second season has been called rushed and poorly paced, and while I do think the pace is blistering, I think the issue is that there are so many damn details packed into every picosecond of this show that you might quite literally miss it if you blink.

And you know what? I think that's exactly in keeping with what Arcane is. To me, this show has always kept the tradition of 'show, don't tell' alive to an absurd degree—it's like a stress test for how much you can strain that particular art before audiences get fed up. This is a show with secrets scribbled into the margins, one where, as evidenced with Ekko's rune shenanigans, you literally won't get the full story on the first run through.

Season one might've done a slightly better job of tying its threads together in a digestible fashion, but I think we all forget that it managed to cover a heaping helping of ground in nine episodes. Episodes which have all had time to age like fine wine in the minds of their fans as they scrub through microexpressions, symbolism, and foreshadowing. This is a show that gets stuck in your teeth. You gotta spend some time picking it out, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

A screenshot was initially shared on X by eggbertith, who noticed some strangeness in Jinx's hand in a banner image. Suspicions of AI-generated content arose immediately and were effectively confirmed by Riot, which apparently wasn't any happier about it than the fans.

"Appreciate you bringing this to our attention," Riot brand manager Alex Shahmiri wrote on X (via GamesRadar). "We have a strict stance of no AI for anything relating to Arcane cause it's disrespectful to the incredible artists who worked on the show. This image was a mistake and has since been removed. TY again for calling it out."

By all appearances, this isn't Riot's whiff: It looks like someone at Netflix took an existing piece of Arcane art and extended it using Photoshop's "generative fill" tool (or something like it) to make it suitable for a banner.

This is the original image, which is still online:

And this is what came out of the machine—the resolution is lower, but the hand is very clearly mangled.

It's not really "AI-generated art," which I think mitigates the situation somewhat, but it is incredibly half-assed, and that's a problem in itself: Media companies who should know better seem to put so much faith into the magic of AI that nobody bothers to pay attention to the results to ensure it's not hacked-up garbage, which leaves us with—you guessed it—hacked up garbage. Either that, or there's a widely-held assumption that mass-media consumers won't notice or won't care that stuff like a promotional thumbnail for the most expensive animated series ever produced is made with the same attention to quality you'd expect from a 99-cent burger. Honestly, I'm not sure which is worse.

In fine "so you hate waffles" fashion, a handful of people pressed Shahmiri about his specific reference to Arcane, as though it somehow implied that Riot is fine with the use of generative AI in everything else it does. "I can only speak to what I work on," he replied to one such inquiry. "From a purely personal level, I'm not a fan of AI because what makes art so special is the human connection and feeling. Be it through art, music, or any creative medium—it's something I never want to see replaced by AI."

"Look, we knew this game represents so many different things to so many different people," Hess says (via IGN). "We knew that whatever we led out with, there was going to be strong opinions across the spectrum of what people were expecting, what they wanted it to be. Everybody brings their own special personal connection to the game. So we were ready for everything."

They are certainly spoilt for choice when it comes to getting creative inspiration from Minecraft, and I can sympathise with the problem of having too much choice. "We've taken an approach to ground it very firmly in what we all refer to as 'vanilla Minecraft,' like the unmodified Minecraft," Olafsson says. "The young character Henry enters the world and is kind of a creator and maker in the real world. And his character then represents the maker or the modder or the builder coming into this world. And as a result, we're going to see some really classic stuff, stuff that we want to see, some Beast Creepers, Endermen, and that kind of stuff. And then we're going to see some new stuff that Henry made."

At this point, I think that it's important to remember that those of us who grew up playing Minecraft during its initial boom are not necessarily the target audience of this film. Olafsson even says that some of the viewers "were not born when the first contracts and the first discussions [for this film] were had." So, I'm not expecting a mature, funny, and thoughtful interpretation of Minecraft, and I understand that it's probably just going to be a mid family-friendly film.

But it would be nice if A Minecraft Movie proved me wrong and turned out to be an alright watch. Apparently, the test screenings went really well, so that does give me a small glimmer of hope. "People are like, 'This is nothing like the trailer, this movie is awesome,'" Olafsson says. "I know people may go like, 'Wait, that's not in the game.' But anybody who's played Minecraft for a while has usually installed some sort of resource pack or mod or changed it in some way for themselves. And that's what this character is doing."

According to the film's director, Jared Hess (via IGN), Jack Black was "as method as it gets." Instead of sending dead spiders to his coworkers, Black decided to immerse himself in Minecraft at every spare moment.

"He was in his trailer anytime he had a break; he was just slaying it in the Overworld,” Hess says. "[The producer and Minecraft senior director Torfi Frans Olafsson] put together a special server just for the crew. Jack got obsessed with searching for lapis lazuli, as he calls it. I mean, every day, it was like, I'd pop in there to go over the scene in the morning, and he would be dressed as Steve playing the game. It was kind of a surreal thing to behold."

Lapis lazuli used to be classified as a rare ore pre-1.17’s Caves and Cliffs update, which changed the ore distribution. Now, the resource is classified as uncommon and can be found at levels -64 to 64, but is most easily found on layer -1. Jack, if you're reading this, try strip mining around there.

While I tend to like stockpiling iron, redstone, and netherite, lapis lazuli is useful for enchanting weapons, books, tools, and armour so it's definetly a great resource to hold onto. It can also be used to make blue dye and fireworks and change the sound under note blocks to make a bass drum noise. But Black isn't just fit for the role of Steve because he knows what ores to look out for.

"He's like an empty page you write your story on,” Frans Olafsson says. “But that was also an opportunity. So casting Jack Black as Steve, maybe you hadn't imagined Jack Black as Steve, but this is the Steve who is Jack Black, if you know what I mean. Because I'm Steve, and you're Steve, and Jared's Steve, and everybody has been Steve, and this one is the Jack Black Steve. For him, we felt that he should have the joy, curiosity, fun, and humor that we have seen in the Minecraft community over the years, like through YouTube videos and all of their creations.”

The official trailer for the upcoming Minecraft movie, creatively entitled A Minecraft Movie, has arrived, giving us a more detailed rundown of the story and a release date of April 4, 2025. It also continues to look very bad. But not as bad—take that for what it's worth.

The plot, as we've previously discussed, is essentially a reskinned Jumanji: Four misfits are pulled from their less-than-satisfying real-world lives into the Overworld, where they embark upon a quest with a local weirdo to save the realm from the forces of evil, discover the inner qualities that make them unique and beautiful, and are ultimately sent back home and given a second chance to break out of their shells and thrive.

Am I being cynical? Maybe, but I don't think it's entirely unfair. Because the film itself looks so cynical: The whole thing screams of design by committee, with that guy you like and that other guy who's a comfortable anchoring presence because he does the same thing in every role, and of course an origin story because heaven forbid we don't cram that in somewhere. Throw in some slapstick shenanigans and snarky asides leading into—I'm just guessing here, I haven't read the script or anything, but I'm pretty confident in staking this one out—forged bonds and a heroic arc in which everyone learns something about themselves and each other, and blammo, you've got the next big Hollywood hit—or at least a reliable moneymaker. Right?

Despite my misgivings, the reaction to this trailer seems to be much more positive than the response to the first. That's a low bar, yes—the first video currently wears more than 1.8 million dislikes, compared to just 730,000 likes—but there's also some genuine enthusiasm for some of the smaller details on display, like the reference to the "children yearn for the mines" meme and the use of music from the game.

None of which is any guarantee that A Minecraft Movie will be a good movie, but at least there's a small sense that the production team has an awareness of the game and culture surrounding it, and is injecting some aspect of that into the film. Coupled with the very on-the-nose "Minecraft trailer, take two" opening, it's pretty clear that Warner is going hard to turn things around after the catastrophe of the initial reveal.

To its credit, Warner has succeeded in elevating my own expectations: I am now open to the possibility that A Minecraft Movie won't be even worse than the Borderlands film. I still think it's going to be really bad, but a Rotten Tomatoes score in excess of 10% now seems doable. Hey, take what you can get.

A Minecraft Movie is set to arrive in theaters in North America on April 4, 2025, and will show up internationally two days earlier, on April 2. I am still hoping very much that we make Joshua Wolens watch it.

First things first: Yes indeed, a live-action Splinter Cell was in the works, to some extent. Don't feel bad if you either didn't know or had completely forgotten about it. The film was announced in 2012 with Tom Hardy in the lead as Sam Fisher, and not much else—a deal with a studio hadn't even been struck at that point—and that was pretty much the end of it.

Until today, that is, when producer Basil Iwanyk confirmed that it's not happening. "That movie would have been awesome," Iwanyk said. "Just couldn't get it right, script-wise, budget-wise. But it was going to be great. We had a million different versions of it, but it was going to be hardcore and awesome. That's one of the ones that got away, which is really sad."

It's unfortunate that an "awesome" and "great" film project couldn't overcome basic hurdles to make it across the finish line, but such is the way in the movie biz, I suppose. It also seems to be the way for Splinter Cell, which remains deeply snakebit: A remake of the original announced in 2021 remains MIA and a planned Splinter Cell VR game was cancelled in 2022. Netflix is moving ahead with a Splinter Cell animated series, which might seem like a decent consolation prize in lieu of the film, but Michael Ironside isn't in it so it might as well not even be happening.

Ironically, or however you want to describe it, the Watch Dogs film Ubisoft announced in 2013—after the announcement of the Splinter Cell movie, to be clear—is moving forward, so we're getting that instead. I really do not understand Hollywood.